Post 7 - Removing the Ballast or, A Tale of Two Keels

This blog entry deals with opening up the keels from the top and removing the contents:

I have read of Keel problems from other Vivacity owners. Once I started looking closely at my Vivacity, I had concerns about a crack I saw down by the bilge. I decided it would be best to just rip all the interior out and start anew, since I wanted to modify the front V-birth, anyway. That way, I will also be able to carefully inspect the entire interior of the hull. 

This picture on the left shows the crack in the hull that I was concerned with.  When I bought the boat, it was sitting on it's trailer, uncovered, and there was water sitting in the bottom. The crack was submerged.  With cold Utah winters, I was worried about the freeze- thaw effect of water sitting in this crack.

The picture to the right shows what I saw when I began to excavate this crack. One of the reasons that I am including these "before" pictures is so others can see and compare to their own boats, in case they are worried about the same situation.

The  next three pictures  show the "cap piece" that was covering the ballast. The cap piece is comprised of some sort of concrete. I used my hammer-drill to punch through this layer in the middle, and then I was able to pry it up fairly easily with a crowbar. This cap piece was about 3 1/2" thick and the ballast, which consisted of steel punchings, was located directly below it.

  I was expecting the steel ballast to be held together with some sort of resin, but that did not seem to be the case,  Some of it had fused together a bit, and some of it was stuck to the sides of the keel, but it was quite loose.  As you can see from one of the pictures below, once I had dug down about 5 or 6 inches into the keel ballast, I hit standing water. I also ended up hitting water at the same level in the starboard keel, which surprised me since there were no cracks evident anywhere near the top cap of this other keel. I was expecting it to be in better shape. Another thing that really surprised me is that the water sat in there for so long without finding a way to leak out of the keels.