Well I finished building a new forward hatch and got it installed on the boat. I originally tried to repair and refinish the old hatch but I reassembled it with the new Acrylic oriented 90 deg off and disassembling it caused the cracked wood to break up even more. My final solution was to get some rough cut Mahogany from the Wood Craft store and make my own from scratch. I wish I had a before picture to put hear, my fault, I need to take more before pictures. The bad news is after installing the hatch I was unable to start the engine. I had to remove the head because the #3 and #4 exhaust valves were stuck. Once the head was off I found the #4 valve broken. I removed the exhaust from the boat and took it home to test and found there was an open seam inside the wet muffler that allowed sea water to run back down the exhaust and hit the hot exhaust valved #3 and #4 being the lowest point on the engine. So every time I shut off my the engine cold water would quench the hot exhaust vales eventually causing one to fail. I'm now waiting for a new valve and gaskets from Moyer Marine this week and I'll be fabricating a new water lift exhaust system for the boat.
