Aluminum boat repair.

Say a guy runs into a dock and dents the front side of his boat, lets say the size of a snowboard just for example. Do you think pounding the dent out would cause this area to be structurally too weak?

dented or creased? riveted or welded? above or below the water line?

Heres a picture of the boat. I am considering buying it cheaply, but I dont want a unsafe boat when finished and really dont want to invest $3000 in repairs either.

by looking at it from your pic. it can be done somewhat. you won’t be able to get it all and i think the rivets are stretched abit. i think with a lot of hard patient work you could get it out pretty close. where the deepest crease is may buckle and split open, but would easily be welded up. by looks it will still show a nice banged up job, but you should be able to get it look okay. good-luck!

ouch. how do you hit a dock hard enough to do that. he must have been going pretty fast. i would think you could pound it out or just go to the local dealer and have it fixed. shouldnt cost you too much. just tell the guy that you will buy the boat if he pays half for the dent to be removed.

To pay for half of the dent would be more than what I plan on paying him total!

I also dont think it will cost to much.As far as a streched rivet it dosent happen. The head will pop off or the rivet will pull out of the hole.I would take it in and have it looked at it should be to spendy to fix it.

It is definitely possible to get the dent out. It will never be as good as new however. Anytime you stretch metal it will weaken it somewhat. In this case, I can’t say how much it will weaken. I don’t see any rivets that would be stretched The hardest part to get straightened out will be in the hull where the curve starts. If you are not worried about it looking perfect, it can be repaired by you. If you can get to the hull from the inside, I would try slowly pounding it out from the inside . If the main crease is welded, it may split apart. If that happens, any good welder can reweld and smooth it out to look nice. If it is cheap enough, go for it. Other than the dent, it looks like a nice boat

Before you go welding on it, I had a book on aluminum boat building that had some stats you should know. I think welded boats use a 5000 series aluminum that only loses 10% of its strenght along a weld. And if I remember right, riveted boats use a different alloy aluminum that can loses up to 90% of its strenght. Some thing you might want to think about.

Go to the boat dealers web site and check what they use for their boats.

WarrenMN

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