First Glass On

February 15, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  684

The plans call for a fiberglass band all around the boat at the chine for strength and ding protection.  I thought it would be a good chance to practice fiberglassing, since I have only done it twice.  It turned out to be very tricky, so I’m glad we tried this out before the huge surfaces on the hull itself.

The band is 9-ounce fiberglass tape 8 inches wide.  Very nice stuff with a good sharp edge from Defender Industries.  But the usual technique of working with a plastic squeegee-spreader to move the epoxy around and force it down through the glass to the wood was very difficult on such narrow surfaces.  I tended to catch the edges or flip epoxy all over the place, and finally used a brush, which is slow going and uses a lot of epoxy.  Ray was working down on the flatter surfaces, and seemed to get the hang of the spreader right away, so did about two-thirds of the boat.

Friday I rolled on the fill coats with one minor disaster.  It has been down in the teens here forever, and today is yet another blizzard.  The shop was very cold when I came in, so I warmed up the epoxy a bit with a heat gun to get it to flow.  But the back of the boat down by the steel doors was very cold when I put it the epoxy on and it got pretty thick.  I left for lunch and a supply run, and as the furnace warmed up the shop, it warmed up the epoxy which ran into big gummy drips down the side of the boat while I was gone.  Hours of sanding will be needed to take them out.  During the major glassing, I will have to keep the shop warm all night and pay the piper.

We are using West 207 Clear Hardener which contains some chemicals that are a bit more aggressive than the regular stuff.  So I figured out a way to put a flip-up ventilator in the door frame.  Let’s in some cold, but in conjunction with the furnace and dust collector, a lot of air is moving through the shop.

Chine band

Ah shit!!!!

Ventilator down

Ventilator up