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Mercruiser 4.3 front engine mounts stripped screw hole repair

D

dariusss

New member
Hi everyone,
Is anyone could give me any ideas how to repair stripped front engine mount screw hole at the stringer? Many many thanks
 
Ayuh,.... Drill it over-sized, 'n beat in an ash dowel, 'n epoxy, or fill it with epoxy, 'n glass,.....

If you find anything but dry wood in the hole, yer stringer/ motor mount is just plain rotten, 'n needs to be replaced,.....
 
bondo said:
If you find anything but dry wood in the hole, yer stringer/ motor mount is just plain rotten, 'n needs to be replaced,.....
Click to expand...

Disagree. The wood inside the stringer does nothing structurally speaking. It is merely a form over which layers of glass roving are laid to make a beam. Since it's impossible to remove, it's just left in place. If it rots or gets waterlogged it's not really a big deal except to say that the reason it rots is that water is getting into the wood, which means it was either a crappy lay up from the factory or there is some compromise to the fiberglass layers. I've seen wood stringers merely tabbed to the inside of the hull (wow) and wood stringers so deeply and thoroughly encapsulated that the wood was bone dry 40-odd years on. Waterlogged is a problem due to weight and freezing/cracking.
soooo, if the wood is wet or dry is immaterial if the hull lay up is strong.
 
In theory you are right but in reality you are wrong.

Once the stringer wood is wet and rotted the fiberglass over it will collapse from the weight of the engine and the alignment will go out.

Seen it many times.............

Just sayin....................
 
I must admit, I am with Jack on that one.

If you do pull the stringers apart, cut the tops out only, leaving as much of the shells as possible.
Add your new core material, glass strands and resin, and close the tops back up.


.
 
Nope, that just reveals a sh***y build. Stringers should no way collapse if the core goes bad. In the old days when glass hulls were first built, they OVER built them. Three layers of roving over the stringers ain't gonna fail. By the early 70's EVERYBODY was making molds and filling them with chop gunned layup and questionable quality control (minimum-wage employees with fiberglass rollers breathing polyester resin fumes all day...what a awful job) You see 2x8 lumberyard stock chop gunned or, worse, lightly tabbed to hulls. These cheesy hulls were never destined to last very long but there are still survivors out there. You gotta know what you're looking at. In almost every case of rotten stringers, the culprit is the lowly limber hole. These are cut in the stringer but left completely untreated and when the glass goes on, they end up with exposed wood down in the lowest part of the bilge. There they are year after year slowly suckin up water.
Nowadays hulls have structural liners and no more wooden stringers. Thank heavens. At least that's one thing less to worry about. You can move on to aluminum tanks embedded in foam, electrical wiring run in the bilge between the layers of hull and liner, poorly installed seacocks, etc.
 
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