Yesterday was our official “kickoff” to the restoration project, and we had 20+ people show up to volunteer. Tim Ramsey started us off with what the plan was going forward, and that we had already exceeded his expectations at this point. I followed up Tim explaining why my team bought the hull in the first place and that we were all excited to bring this boat back from the dead.
Tim was figuring that we wouldn’t have the deck removed until after Thanksgiving weekend, and we knocked it out by the end of the night!
One thing we noticed was that the Jones sponsons didn’t have any drain holes inbetween the rib bays, therefore they were susceptible to retaining water (think of a ice cube tray). Once the sponson decks were removed, there was about 3 inches of water in the bottom. No doubt this helped cause the rapid corrosion we found to the wood material inside, but we would be replacing these sponsons anyway……………so it didn’t really matter what shape they were in.
As the volunteers paid extra attention to removing any salvageable hardware from the hull, we only damaged a few batons along the way……………not too bad considering.
Our next steps are to remove the cockpit and detach the sponsons. Once that’s done, we will clean out the hull and see what we have to work with…………………..what we can save, and what we cannot.
Our main concern is the rear of the hull, as it appeared to be original and still in reasonable salvageable condition. Our efforts will be focused there going forward, but all looks promising at this point.
More to come for sure…….
Please check out the photo gallery below to see our progress.
Photo Gallery: we really start opening things up!
