Leaky forward hatch part 2

My last post I was waiting for the Lexan to arrive. Now that I have all the materials and the sun is out in full glory, I continued the hatch repair. I continued by hand sanding the frame and glassed over the weak and damaged areas keeping it salty looking. Your a real sailor if you hand sand this day and age.

Then just as things always do while working on boats, just when things are going along absolutely too smoothly I got into hot water quickly. I realised after a few rainy days that the base of the hatch had to be rebedded. This was starting to become a nightmare because rebedding the base of the hatch frame would require me to remove large overhead beams and fine oak planks inside the vbirth, just to gain access to the hardware.

After a few moons of thinkng I came up with a solution. I just realized that I could use my saw to cut the screws from underneath the frames. Leaving my oak-planks intact and my wife very happy.

   

Once this base was removed I sanded and appyled epoxy using a west systems filler for bonding wood to fiberglass. To keep the pieces in place while the epoxy cured I used wood dowels. By drilling shallow holes in the cabin top and underneath the wood strips, I was able to keep things square. Once the epoxy cured I then proceeded to cetol the remaining exposed wood. This should never leak again and its much stronger now. Ive just got to keep the cetol fresh. 

Re-finishing the hatch was the same process two coats of natural teak cetol and two coats of clear gloss cetol. Ive left the wood dowels out just to give it a salty look. Some of the hatch has been repaired and looks awsome with the epoxy ive placed over these damaged areas. 

I will also add that I bedded the lexan to the wood using 4000 and I found a Taco brand "D" gasket with very good adhesive qualities.