Using A Moisture Meter On Solid Fiberglass Laminate

This is the this is the fundamental problem with trying to meter hulls for wet cores. Virtually every high performance racing sail or powerboat is cored. While a moisture meter newbie might gain some useful information more on that in a minute using one to accurately assess the state of a hull requires deep experience.

vintage 3 bulb floor lamp replace carpet on stairs with hardwood vinyl cartridge alignment tool vinyl cutter and heat press machine rose gold permanent vinyl michaels west elm dining table mid century vanish products for carpets ultimate granite golden titanium

Understanding The Moisture Meter Marine How To

Moisture Testing Steve D Antonio Marine Consulting

Moisture Meter Mythology And Flir Thermal Imager

Delamination Repair

Eliminating Deck Rot Ocean Navigator

Fiberglass Boatbuilding Resins And Laminating Techniques Wave Train

Lower levels of moisture are common and tapping of the area can identify if there is a problem that needs to be repaired.

Using a moisture meter on solid fiberglass laminate. Part of the problem in answering this question comes from the fact that we cannot determine whether we are reading moisture behind the laminate versus within the laminate. 176 are meters affected by humidity. 176 does old gel coat absorb high amounts of water. Using moisture meters 173 what does a meter really detect.

Fiberglass is a good material to use in boats as it has many good attributes. So better to hire an experienced professional surveyor or perhaps a boat yard technician see last article to do the work for us. 176 do meters read fluids other than water. However it should be.

The moisture meter is an essential device to perform a good survey on a fiberglass boat. Once again the meter can determine if moisture is present in a solid laminate even if all looks well to the naked eye. Core rot degradation and the physical failure of the core can begin at about a 20 reading on the ct 33 sometimes sooner which is in the high moist range. The meter won t tell us what part is wet the skin the core or both.

Where osmosis repair is concerned the moisture meter will enable a fiberglass specialist to determine how. These readings have been taken with a. 176 hydrolysis 177 water. A surveyor can identify high moisture in the core or laminate using a moisture meter.

As you ll notice a 30 moisture saturation in wood or a cored section is only equal to 3 total absorbed moisture on a solid fiberglass with no core. This is a very important part of any moisture meter and if you don t have that scale it does not matter whether the meter tells you it is 100 or 10 because you don t know what those numbers translate to in fiberglass. We tend to believe that solid fiberglass is stronger and less likely to suffer damage from water saturation and the latter is true. The mass production of fiberglass.

After using a moisture meter on over 1 000 surveys i have yet to see a recently hauled boat that indicated anything less than high 7 on a scale of 1 10 on surfaces below the waterline. However it is not perfect and there are drawbacks.