Hi Kurt,

Like you, I'm not worried about looks, but water in the wood worries me.

I put 5 or 6 layers of sacrificial glass on my stems when I initially glass my boats to prevent just such problems. Also, when building, I put a layer or two of ash as an outer stem over the lighter density cedar or okoume...having a hard wood under the glass can help keep the glass from cracking as easily..which leads to it abrading more quickly.

Kevlar, dynel, or other polyester fabrics will help prevent wear. Carbon fiber is not great for abrasion resistance. Glass is good, because it's cheap--it's not the absolute greatest for abrasion resistance...but better than CF, and it's also available. Keep your sacrificial strips as narrow as possible to keep weight down--there's no reason to wrap it very far up the hull--as you've seen, the abrasion is constrained to the very bottommost part of the stem.

: No, this ain't about seats, thank goodness. It's about hull bottoms and
: fiberglass warfare with limestone river rocks and saltwater oyster reefs
: (etc.). The problem, in a nutshell, is that Leslie and I are scraping the
: hell out of our boats! We're not overly worried about looks, but when
: gouges are going through to bare wood it gets our attention. Specifically,
: we're really concerned about the aft ends, which lose everything right
: down to bare wood for some two inches (see photo below). This took several
: trips to accomplish, btw, and duct tape patches have served 'til now...
: heh heh heh... (omigod)

: We try to be careful when launching, recovering and beachng... but if I have
: to be more careful yet the boats will not be worth having! As chief
: builder I am in no panic; I shall just fix it and make it stronger. The
: question is how to make it stronger? For now I have merely added 'glass
: patches (see website, last entry, last page). I have thought about a
: second layer of 'glass, or carbon fiber, or Kevlar, etc. But nothing
: sounds just right... I need guidance!

: The hulls are built using 6mm okoume for the bottom panels, 4mm for the
: balance. Raka 127/350 epoxy and Raka 5 oz cloth clad the exterior of the
: hulls.

: Thanks,

: Kurt & Leslie

: Note: the photo doesn't show the bare wood clearly, as the wound is
: impregnated with river sand. But the white, scraped up looking glass is
: actually where the cloth ends and bare wood begins. Ouch.