This boat was launched in 1989 so is relatively young for a Searunner. The main problem is it was built from interior grade Luan plywood and has had a series of inexperienced owners neglecting the boat in the tropics.
This refit project was actually begun in mid-2010 by another "multi-hull specialist" in St Augustine and only reassigned to me this March. Do to a variety of problems and ball-dropping the project was never close to finished whilst the boat sat languishing in St Augustine for almost 2 years!
As I write this; Serenity is back afloat in St Augustine and was out on a test sail a week ago. Still much work remains to be "offshore cruise ready" but the owners future plans are uncertain and he's working on deciding how to best proceed. The new engine runs great and he's extremely pleased to no longer have seawater leaking into the bilges from the old centerboard trunk!
I ended up using AB Marine Fir plywood for the new trunk as there was a shortage of Meranti in Florida for some reason around the time I began this process. It's my understanding Meranti is getting hard to come by, which is a good thing as it it is a tropical hardwood and probably really shouldn't be logged. The main downside to fir is the checking, but I choose to glass both side of the trunk with 2 layers on the outside of 8.5 oz fiberglass and one on the inside. The bare ply in this picture will receive the butt joint and timber reinforcements for the mast step on the inner trunk sides.
These will be the inner side that have the 2 layers of glass with the centerboard itself bearing against it.
Here is a closeup of the glass overlap on the inside layup. The glass is 38" wide and the ply 48" No problem as I'm wrapping the edges with bias glass and will simply overlap up to this edge.
I routed a nice radius on the lower edges to wrap with glass and protect the end grain.
Here are two pics of the glassed edge. This took quite a bit of time, but I feld protecting the lower edges from both water intrusion and wear from the board war very important. The edges were later faired into the mini-keel and then that joint cover with 3 additional layers of glass. I'll try to get some pictures up of that later, but was very hard to photograph and trunk is only 4" wide and joint was around 10" up from bottom of mini-keel opening.
Here you can see the pieces all glass and sanded; ready to be shoe-horned into the boat.
As the interior sole/sub floors and cockpit sub floors were still in good shape I cut these wedges from scrap ply to apply clamping pressure inside the trunk area when gluing the sides in place. It was all a bit tricky, but it went well.
The trunk had to be "built" in place with one side glues in per day and the vertical trunk end logs fitted later between the 2 side. Here are some pics of the fully 4" wide end logs made from fir timber.
The top and bottom of all the logs were glassed to protect the end grain, same as the ply. The inside faces were also covered in glass then the longs joints between this piece and the trunk sides were well filleted and then the entire inner trunk epoxy barrier coated with Interlux 2000.
More later on the engine install and the deck paint, chainplate and other repairs.
