E29 More Problems -- Debuilding.

So No Problem needed to come clean about it's past, and if I was ever to get my soon to be wife to come aboard, I had to fix the petrole-mold smell. Unfortunately, much of it was not visible due to the liner arrangement. A couple of biopsies did not go well..



The keel sump had been filled with lead ingots and haphazardly glassed and filled with "great stuff"-like foam. This was of course never going to work, and I also wanted to fill in this potential sinking hazzard of a sump. To get to it, Several weekends of labor involved removing the A4, cutting out the engine bay liner (with the rotten stringers and engine mounts,)

excavating the foam,

extracting the ingots, and cleaning + sanding. Hopefully I didn't get too much lead exposure. What was I talking about again? Anyways, Finally replacing the ingots in a much more orderly fashion and then...



filling the sump with a mixture of 1x50lb bag of sand, chopped fiberglass, and epoxy.



This process consisted of several 1.5" pours. I didn't want the exotherm to destroy the existing layup so it was slow going. The lead ingots absorbed quite a bit of heat but once they were covered, it got quite warm in there, to the point that not only did I go to .5" pours, I was hosing off the outside of the keel to keep the temperature below what I felt was reasonable. This was done with 2-1 Marinepoxy with slow hardener, and I went through about 5 gallons of it to finish this out. More in the next episode...

Sean