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Once in my shop I cut the top of the roof off.

Done! Scary that this only took two minutes! Not enough time to change my mind...

I decided the best course of action for converting to a high top was to remove the roof and then do the modifications in my heated shop. Removal took about two minutes with a recipro saw with carbide blade.

I used smooth 1/4" masonite to make forms (forgot to take pictures) for the new sidewalls and applied one intial layer of 1708 fiberglass. Here I've added a temporary support to push the new sidewall into proper alignment while epoxy cures.

I'm hoping there is a way to reorder, but in the meantime I deleted the contents of the album and re-uploaded the images in reverse order. Basically the albums are loaded as a stack, so the most recent (last) addition is on top, and in this case the top is the first picture in line. If there is...

Here's what my transom looked lke after removing swim step, motor, and transducers. Existing holes were drilled out, any bad balsa core removed, then filled with thickened epoxy and glassed over.

My boat originally had a black plastic cap over the top of the transom. Part of it was missing and it was evident someone had done repairs to the transom top in the past. I decided to remove the remaining cap and the old repairs and see what I could find.

What a mess! How far does this go?

I grabbed a chisel and went to work. I found that someone had covered up rotted balsa (or maybe it was just wet at the time?) with some sort of white substance.

What I found was dry rotted balsa.

Eventually I got to balsa that was hard and solid.

In a couple places I had to dig deep to get to good balsa.

Here I've replaced the rotten balsa with new balsa. It was bedded into epoxy and I've set up a jig so I can use a router to make the top of the balsa perfectly flat and level, in preparation for adding a fiberglass cap.

Once the top of the new balsa was leveled, I placed some thickened epoxy on the top and let it cure.

Here I am positioning a jig to assist in leveling the top of the transom before adding the fiberglass cap.

Using the jig to route the top of the transom in preparation for adding the fiberglass cap.

The board is being used as a guide for adding faring compound to the edges of the transom top, in order to ensure that the thickness of the top is consistent before it is glassed over.

Here is the final cap which consists of three layers of 1708 fiberglass. Note that the edges of the top are more rounded than those of the original transom. This is because, even though I am bending the 1708 on the bias, it ends up making a rounded corner. The only way to avoid this would been...