Monday, July 8, 2024

Floor grid repair on Farr 727 Lion Passant

When I purchased my Farr 727 Lion Passant, she had a separated and cracked floor grid and a survey report stating that this was not a structural issue. I have come to the opinion that the floor grid is necessary to spread the side loads from the keel. While I have sailed the boat for more than a year as is, Bruce Farr designed the boat to have wood frames to spread this load. (See photo of part of the plans).


The keel is attached through bolts that are in turn bolted to frames

The Northstar version used a floor pan tabbed with a single layer of woven roving to the hull. On Lion, this roving tabbing had sheared and separated in almost all the 5 box divisions of the floor. See the following photos from when I bought the boat.


Keel attachment - 2 keel blots and a reinforced 1 by 8 stringer. Note sheered tabbing around floor pan that someone has filled with a putty


Cracked floor pan

I bought epoxy and fiberglass cloth to effect this repair and began work last week. Tomorrow I hope to finish painting the repaired floors. Here is my work to date in photos:

Getting started. I have used an angle grinder and oscillating muti-tool to cut and grind away the old tabbing and make things ready for new fiberglass and epoxy tabbing.

This shows a single prepared box in the floor pan

The farthest aft box was only damaged on 3 sides

An area around the crack in the center cross piece was ground back around the crack

Similarly on the starboard side

The front three boxes have been tabbed with at least 4 layers of heavy cloth

Detail of one grid box

The aft box required much less area to be glassed but I used the same layup

The cross piece repair required mushroom shaped glass pieces and L shaped pieces and needed at least 6 to 8 layers.


Back at home I primed and painted the floor hatch boards


Here is the completed tabbing taped off and ready for priming

And here is the primed floor. I will finish the painting in the next couple of days with another coat of primer and at least one of Interlux one part polyurethane










1 comment:

  1. Nice job. Agreed, it wouldn’t have cracked like that in it wasn’t structural.

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