Howdy,
On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Mark Andy wrote:
> My fiancee's current house has a fiberglass built-in tub/shower unit. It
> has a "soft spot" in the floor of the tub that flexes when you step on it.
> Its also starting to show some cracks in the surface coat. The spot is
> perhaps 6"x12" or so. The cracks don't appear to be through the material
> and there don't seem to be leaks (yet).
So I poked around with this over the weekend... Ended up cutting an
access panel into the subfloor underneath the tub. Definately a Monday
morning tub or something... There was a 1/2" or so plywood supported
fiberglassed in underneath the tub from edge to edge.... except for right
near where the soft spot was where they'd cut out a notch so that it
didn't go all the way to the edge of the tub. When someone pressed on the
tub you could see it flexing above & back a bit from the edge of the 1/2"
plywood.
Ended up just bracing that area down to the subfloor. That took most of
the softness away but not all. Now however, when you step in that area
and bounce up and down, you can feel the tub contact something hard that
provides a stop.
Since the bracing is in there quite tightly, I can only guess that the
1/2" plywood reinforcement that I was bracing up probably had a void or
something in that area as well. It looked like to fix it to not flex at
all, I'd need to cut the 1/2" fiberglassed-in plywood out, then fiberglass
in my own piece, along with more reinforcement. Ended up deciding that
wasn't necessary since my full weight bouncing up and down directly over
the soft spot only flexed it a little bit prior to contacting some
support.
So, its about 97% better than it was. I can live with that. :-)
Thanks for the advice!
Mark
|