Fiberglassing
It's exciting every time I get to the next stage of building the boat. After filling the screw holes with famowood and using system three QuickFair to smooth out the scarf joints in the panels it is time to start fiberglassing. I sanded down all of the sharp corners of the boat, mainly around the chines and transom because the fiberglass won't bond well to sharp angles. It will end up creating air bubbles on the corners witch we really don't want.
I used the fiberglass kit from Glen-L. I couldn't find any instructions on how to use which fiberglass sheet where, so I finally decided to use one sheet to cover the bottom of the boat and the transom. Then trimmed it to size.
I invited some friends out to help in the process. Much easier to do with extra hands than by yourself. When dealing with epoxy and having to work quickly it is nice to have someone to mix the epoxy and multiple people to poor and smooth out the epoxy into the fiberglass weave. We poured it strait onto the weave and the spread it out with squeegees.
After the bottom layer was I applied I laid fiberglass to each side panel of the boat, one at a time.
I ended up rolling on 4 coats of the system three epoxy which worked really well. After the 4th coat I sanded it down with 80 grit paper with a random orbital sander and applied a fifth coat after that. The results are mesmerizing!
As nice as it is starting to look I am still going to paint the hull for several reasons. 1st the scarf joints were a little rough requiring fairing compound to get to a smooth hull. If I leave it bare wood that fairing compound will not be covered up. If I want to ever build another boat and have it show the wood grain I would have used a butt joint instead of a scarf joint on the side and bottom panels. Also I ran out of plywood colored famowood wood filler so I also used mahogany famoowood wood filler for the screw holes which would be quite noticeable in the finished product. Thirdly, I have a really hard time not getting any contamination in the epoxy causing some sort of fisheye or orang peel affect in the epoxy finish. But no need to worry. When I finish painting the hull it's going to look like a piece of art!
It's exciting every time I get to the next stage of building the boat. After filling the screw holes with famowood and using system three QuickFair to smooth out the scarf joints in the panels it is time to start fiberglassing. I sanded down all of the sharp corners of the boat, mainly around the chines and transom because the fiberglass won't bond well to sharp angles. It will end up creating air bubbles on the corners witch we really don't want.
I used the fiberglass kit from Glen-L. I couldn't find any instructions on how to use which fiberglass sheet where, so I finally decided to use one sheet to cover the bottom of the boat and the transom. Then trimmed it to size.
I invited some friends out to help in the process. Much easier to do with extra hands than by yourself. When dealing with epoxy and having to work quickly it is nice to have someone to mix the epoxy and multiple people to poor and smooth out the epoxy into the fiberglass weave. We poured it strait onto the weave and the spread it out with squeegees.
After the bottom layer was I applied I laid fiberglass to each side panel of the boat, one at a time.
I ended up rolling on 4 coats of the system three epoxy which worked really well. After the 4th coat I sanded it down with 80 grit paper with a random orbital sander and applied a fifth coat after that. The results are mesmerizing!
As nice as it is starting to look I am still going to paint the hull for several reasons. 1st the scarf joints were a little rough requiring fairing compound to get to a smooth hull. If I leave it bare wood that fairing compound will not be covered up. If I want to ever build another boat and have it show the wood grain I would have used a butt joint instead of a scarf joint on the side and bottom panels. Also I ran out of plywood colored famowood wood filler so I also used mahogany famoowood wood filler for the screw holes which would be quite noticeable in the finished product. Thirdly, I have a really hard time not getting any contamination in the epoxy causing some sort of fisheye or orang peel affect in the epoxy finish. But no need to worry. When I finish painting the hull it's going to look like a piece of art!
Nice Worker Tucker. I feel like these blogs are a nice addition to our forum postings in the Glen L forum. The hull looks good and I see from your forum entry that you are having the same paint issues I had a few years ago with the Texas heat.
ReplyDeleteIf your interested, checkout my build blog at www.veracruise.blogspot.com
Take care
Carl
Thanks, I will check it out. As you can tell I am not good at keeping the blog up to date.
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