The Separation

One of the first things I learned was that there was no way to work on this boat and do the repairs unless the two halves were separated!  This is why the boat sat untouched (except for grinding off some bondo) for the first 6 months.  Also, it was the winter and I didn't put it in the garage.  But during the spring of 2015 I put the boat in the garage on top of two sawhorses with long boards between them, and went to work on separating the top and bottom.  Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the process until it was done.

First thing I did was pull out the rubber insert from the rub rail, which was attached to the seam of the two halves.  This exposed all the screws that hold on the rub rail, so I first I thought I would try removing the screws.  They were all completely rusted, so that wasn't going to work.  Then I thought I could just drill them out, but after trying all kinds of different bits and drills and cutting oils, I gave up on that also.  The best solution was to use a high-quality hardened metal-cutting plunge cutter blade on a vibrating tool.  I used a pry bar to pull the rub rail a little bit away from the top half, and make a small gap where I could insert the plunge cutting blade flat against the boat and slide it down behind the rub rail to cut the screws.  It was hard to avoid damaging the fiberglass a little bit here and there, but it allowed me to go all the way around the boat and remove the rub rail.  

Once the rub rail was removed, it exposed all the rivets and hardened gap filler that attached the two halves, plus the rest of the cut off screws from the rub rail that were still going through the top half and into the bottom half.  Now I did the same process, but I used the pry bar to pull the top half away from the bottom and make a gap to slide the plunge cutting blade upward between the overlap of the two halves.  This was much more difficult, and there were probably close to 100 rivets and screws.  Once all these were cut, the biggest obstacle was that the top and bottom were still stuck together by a ton of bondo at the center of the transom, where someone did some terrible hack repair at some point in the past.  There was a band of bondo an inch thick and over a foot long that had to be cut out and removed.  Eventually, and without too much damage, I was able to lift the top half up off of the bottom half, and separate the boat.