In this first picture , you can see the seam between the white bottom hull piece and the blue top deck piece, which overlaps it. These two pieces are screwed together from the outside.
After the two pieces were screwed together, the rubrail was screwed through both pieces from the outside. This effectively covers the seam on the outside of the boat. After the rubrail was screwed on, the inside seam and all the exposed screws and nuts were then taped over with fiberglass. This makes removing the rubrail a little more difficult.
In the second picture, you can see the inside taped seam, and the bulges in the seam where all the scews and nuts have been taped over. The darker holes you can see are where I have already chiseled through the fiberglass and removed the rubrail screws. The remaining bumps are the screws that attach the deck to the hull.
Even after I chiseled the fiberglass out of the way on the inside, the screws were usually too corroded to turn without stripping-out. As a result, I ended up chiseling the rubrail out of the way of the screwhead, as seen in the third picture.
I then cut off the outside screwheads with a
cutoff disk attached to my dremel tool. After the screwheads were cut off, I was able to remove the rubrail .With the rubrail removed, and the tape removed from the inside, I was then able to drive the screws out with a punch from the outside of the boat. I will be filling all these holes in with epoxy, and then I will drill new holes for the new rubrail after I have painted the outside of the boat.
In other news, I purchased a gallon of Franmar Soy Strip to aid with the paint removal. I tested it on a section of the deck by applying it about 1/8" thick and then covering it with waxed paper. After two hours, I removed the waxed paper and I was able to easily scrape the top layer of paint off. There are two layers of paint that I want to remove, so next time I will try leaving the solution on for a longer period of time before I try scraping.
