J/30 Class Association Forums J/30 Forum The Boat, Sails and Equipment Drying Balsa Core with Vacuum and Heat

Ok this is not a fast process, but it is working. I have run the heat and vacuum in this section for about 12 hours now. I just pulled the plastic and breather cloth off and have some good results, but this area isn't quite finished yet because some of the numbers are still too high. I suspect they will start coming down faster now that most of the test area has come down. What we also saw was that the areas above the direct test area were coming down too, albeit more slowly. There is a lot of wet area on this boat and as one molecule moves over and gets pulled out, there are several more to take its place. Checks inside the hull also showed small signs of improvement, but since the test area is directly below the ice box I can't get a reading there. So we will continue this project. I think I will enlarge the vacuum area when I start it back up in the morning with more kerf cuts to the rear of the current test area. I also need to work on condensing the moisture faster so that it does not go past my collector and start messing with my pump setup. It may be that I have to add some copper cooling coils or something to get all of the moisture to condense before it gets to the collector. Some percentage now is going past my T collector and is heading toward my vacuum reserve tanks and the pressure switch. So a couple of more tweaks to this setup are needed.

I will provide another update in a few days when we can see and report some more results. I wish this was going faster, but at least now it is going in the right direction.