----Matty,,,Thanks for your interest. The hull and deck resto was done off sight and I was too dumb to get any pre-resto pics. Mark has some pics of his Doral that might help explain the original concept a bit better. Suffice to say, the original bonding "goo" seems to have been a combination of old chopped and ground up pieces of fiberglass scraped off the floor of the Donzi factory mixed up in some kind of witches cauldron, LOL! Because of that a bunch of that stuff always seems to break loose in between the hull and liner and bounce around in the voids for the life of the boat. We scooped out mounds of it in both the El Pescador and the Spitfire. I think that if sales of the 24 line had kept up any kind of pace, a lot of the problems we have encountered would have been delt with by the factory over time. Unfortunatly, every boat manufacturer in south Florida was already building longer boats that had more appeal at the time and the 24 line couldn't seem to get over the hump.
----The original front seats were the normal Donzi seats on shock absorber bottoms. The bottoms suffered from corrosion and I have decided to go to bolsters. You can see the stands in the one picture. Seats are being built as I type this. Mark has the star-wars seats in his Doral, and I am partial to them, if only for the added storage in the back. They kind of crowd up the cockpit though. The back seat will be a bit more permanent than the original but will allow easier access to the front of the engine compartment.
----Ghost,,,As far as weight removal, you are correct about the addition of many aluminum pieces. Being a twin TRS boat there was a tremendous amount of weight in the stern. Boot stripe was way below the waterline. Problem is that I like the TRS packaging (internal trans,Etc.) so aluminum intakes, heads, exhaust manifolds, etc., etc. have been implemented. Also, we removed a great deal of wood and went to composite for the transom, stringers, bulkheads, etc. Obviously, there are benefits beyond just weight removal with composite usage. Im presently struggling with my desire to have a teak floor against the added weight. Im also redoing the engine hatches which are heavy. The new ones, or possibly one, will be substantially lighter but just as strong. For awhile I struggled with the idea of 280 K-planes because of weight but I like the way they look and work so they are in, LOL!......Bill S
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Originally Posted by mattyboy
