Cracked floor need advice!

[Ramman]

My problem child of a boat is at it again. I noticed last year on my Z21, that there was a crack in the floor where the seat and floor meet. It wasn't very big and decided to deal with it next spring, well spring is here and it got worse over the winter, it looks as if the wood expanded and made it worse. Well after further investigation the gel coat on the floor seperated from the plywood that is under it, and caused it to crack or pull away from the floor. The boat has a one piece molded floor. So now right by the seat the floor (or gelcoat) has lifted about a 1/4 inch. Im looking for hopefully an easy fix, or some suggestions on how to fix it. I thought about putting some screws down to see if it would suck the floor back down again, but Im very uneasy about doing that. In fear of cracking the gelcoat into a million pieces! Any suggestions? Please Help! Thank You

[gcarter]

Can we see some pictures?

[Audiofn]

who put that foam in there? Does not look stock to me. It looks to me like whe ever put the foam in there put to much and it lifted your floow up causing the cracking. Little hard to tell from the pictures you have up there. However what you have to do is find out exactly why the floor is being held up the way that it is. If it is the foam you will have to get in there and scrape it out, grind your glass back and reglass it then have it re-gelcoated. I am sure that is not what you wanted to hear but unfortunatly that is what you will have to do. Since you said that it got worse over the winter then I would look for water in there also that may have expanded when it froze. Water when it freezes does so at over 3000 psi so it does not take much to do a LOT of damag.

Jon

[Chili 18]

Ouch

[gcarter]

I agree with Audiofn. Does the deck come off easily on these boats?

[Ramman]

Well I had a guy look at it at today, turns out the wood inbetween the fiberglass is rotted, the crack that was there must have been there for awhile and was letting water in for quite a long time. So were gonna cut the floor back about a foot replace the wood and get everthing glassed back up and gelcoated. And we noticed that one of the stringers has a slight crack in it, so were gonna glass that up to. It sounds alot easier than it's gonna be im sure. I will keep you guys updated. Thanks for the help!

[Ramman]

Looks as if the Z-21 will be leaving my life very soon, turns out that I have more than just a rotted piece of plywood, both left stringers are completely rotten. It goes in the newspaper tomorrow.:confused: