After doing a few errands first thing this morning, I got right to work. First task was draining the puddles on the roof. The weather here is all over the place - windy, rainy, warm, cold, hot! - with lots of extremes. I decided to tackle glassing one side of the hull. To do this I turned the hull on its side, supported it well and prepped it by giving it a light sand. I set the cloth up on a roller elevated above the hull and then mixed up batch after batch of resin. My madness had me first coating the plywood, letting it absorb and become tacky then draping the cloth over the sticky surface. At first I thought I was in trouble, I couldn't get all the wrinkle and creases out of the cloth. I did the best I could dry and as I didn't seem to be getting anywhere I decided to get some more resin into the mix. Two hours later and a couple of quarts of resin saw the cloth laying down smooth. The key was not giving up and using the rubber squeegees to push the resin and cloth about. The hardest area was right at the fillet between the upper and lower hull panels. You have to work carefully here to avoid areas of non adhereance of the cloth. I did the best I could then checked on it three hours later. I found two problem areas each about 3 inches long. As the resin was still maleable, I pushed the cloth down into the underlying resin and this seems to have worked. Tomorrow I hope all this will have cured enough that I can flip the hull over and repeat the exercise on the other side. It's good to be back at it!
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
After doing a few errands first thing this morning, I got right to work. First task was draining the puddles on the roof. The weather here is all over the place - windy, rainy, warm, cold, hot! - with lots of extremes. I decided to tackle glassing one side of the hull. To do this I turned the hull on its side, supported it well and prepped it by giving it a light sand. I set the cloth up on a roller elevated above the hull and then mixed up batch after batch of resin. My madness had me first coating the plywood, letting it absorb and become tacky then draping the cloth over the sticky surface. At first I thought I was in trouble, I couldn't get all the wrinkle and creases out of the cloth. I did the best I could dry and as I didn't seem to be getting anywhere I decided to get some more resin into the mix. Two hours later and a couple of quarts of resin saw the cloth laying down smooth. The key was not giving up and using the rubber squeegees to push the resin and cloth about. The hardest area was right at the fillet between the upper and lower hull panels. You have to work carefully here to avoid areas of non adhereance of the cloth. I did the best I could then checked on it three hours later. I found two problem areas each about 3 inches long. As the resin was still maleable, I pushed the cloth down into the underlying resin and this seems to have worked. Tomorrow I hope all this will have cured enough that I can flip the hull over and repeat the exercise on the other side. It's good to be back at it!
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