(Help) Bow eye repair on the Northshore

Bump to add, I cannot get to the backside of the bow because there's a wall between the fuel tank and that space. I can only see two avenues of repair.

1. Cutting the casting platform to give the space that's needed to work on the back side of the bow.
2. Grinding the tip of the bow out and then building the fiberglass back up.

Both seem not fun and are not my skill set.

American Hunter by Covington High school. Ronnie will get you right

First- get us some pics. Especially of this casting platform bulkhead.

Second- c’mon man- this is no reason to keep you off the water. “Almost all summer” Bring it somewhere, get it fixed- let’s goooooo!

Hydro Flat in DesAllemands does beautiful work.

Blouin Marine in Raceland does beautiful work.

I bet Blouin would have had you in and out of there within a week.

Pictures as requested. This is the bow eye mid attempt #5 to repair. What's happening with this is the bottom side of the bow eye is missing the backer nut that must've been installed without a lock washer.



This is the fuel tank. The arrow shows the wall behind it. The space behind this wall is what I need to get to if I wanted to fix the bow-eye "correctly".



This is the deck. The rope is lined up with where the wall between the tank and the bow is. The bow eye is probably directly under the trolling motor outlet.



Anyway, I think I may have it. For this attempt what I did was soak 7200 psi epoxy in shredded cotten, wrap the bow-eye "bolts" in this soaked cotton, shoved it back in and then layered the same soaked cotton around the bow-eye plate, and around the edges.

Now I'm just going to do standard "fiberglass" style layering to encase the whole plate and bolts of the bow eye and then paint over it.

I'm not doing a good enough job explaining the problem because I didn't take before photos. There would be nothing to MIG weld it to. The bottom leg of the bow-eye is just in a hole in the hull with nothing behind it and that was the problem.

I couldn't access the back of the bow eye to put a lock washer on and re-tighten the nut, so I basically had two options - cut the casting deck and rebuild it, or do what I did here:



What I did was shove cotton soaked epoxy in the original hole the bolt was in, followed by wrapping the bolt eye plate and bolts in the same soaked cotton. Then I just layered and layered until what you see here.

It's under tension and water proof. I just need to gelcoat around it.

As for why no fishing with this. I couldn't tow the boat safely and I couldn't have it in the water because water would get in the hull. Thanks for all your name drops, but this looks to be done.

I dont have any recs unfortunately but I will say I like watching your vids from time to time. One of the comments said something along the lines of " the Jim Nantz" of fishing. That was accurate,

I don’t think there’s really anything any professional could do for you here. Your options like you said would be to cut an access hatch on the deck and possibly move the eye up or down to where you had access. Or move the fuel tank.

The only thing a professional would possibly have is a specialized tools to work around it, but usually they prefer to just cut and repair in my experience which would have been expensive.

Just be careful because without the nut and backer plate the holding strength is likely reduced considerably.

Maybe remove the trolling motor, cut you an access hole to get to the back of the bow eye. Then patch hole and replace trolling motor , let the trolling motor hide the ugly.

quote:

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Maybe use a threaded hatch cover?

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^^^^This is the answer, just buy a pre made hatch, cut the hole to fit the hatch, repair the nbow eye and bolt in the new hatch.

Suggest you use a 4” version, need someone with little hands to install backer blare/bolt and hold a wrench.