Zenith has been safely stored in my old boat shed for the past 6/7 years drying out until I had the time and enthusiasm to sort her out.
As I replaced the boat shed a couple of weeks ago I put Zenith in the workshop while building the new shed. Whilst it was sat in the workshop I gave her a good looking at - and the upshot is that Zenith is getting restored. The Finn is on a back burner and I've given myself a target of getting Zenith on the water for the 2013 CVRDA nationals.
She was dragged out of a field in Scotland 10+ years ago and had a hard life. There's two holes in the bottom, but on inspection the amount of planking required is no that much and won't be too arduous to do.
I've spent two days poking, looking and plotting and I can't find any rot. Honduras Mahogany is a wonderful thing. The inside of the cockpit has been painted many times - the paint is 1/4" thick in places, but the drying out process has allowed the paint to peel off nicely, leaving lovely wood underneath.
There's 104 ribs on each side, to 208 in total. Of which 86 are broken. This is going to be the major part of the restoration. The ribs are 1/2" x 1/4" oak, so I can see the winter taken up with steaming, steaming and more steaming.
Structurally she's fine. I've had to repair a few broken deck beams and refix a few more. I've made 3 replacements for missing ones - this has been taxing, remembering how to do beam shelf joints then doing them at such a tiny scale.
Anyway - here's some pics of her after I removed the remains of the ply deck - this was screwed in, with screws every 1" on every beam - hours to remove them as most of the decking was missing with the screws left in place.
