Epoxy coating hulls

So after a very busy day of cutting and routing the plywood pieces, here is where the project stood on Sunday morning. Six pairs of bulkheads with their corresponding templates, four bow panels, one pair of hull panels trimmed to final shape and three pair of hull panels roughly cut.

I wish we stopped to take photos of the next part because it was kind of clever, but i'll describe it instead. In order to hold the good hull sides to the rough cut pieces during the routing we used a staple gun around the edges instead of two sided tape like we had been using on the bulkheads. This turned out to be very quick and stable and the bottom edges are going to be heavily epoxied and fiberglassed anyway because of the stitching later on.

After the SNAFU with cutting out extra bulkheads we took the time to lay out all the panels on the lawn and identify which sides to determine the inside and outside for each piece.

That meant it was time to break out the 5 gallon jug of West epoxy and start coating. Every internal surface gets two coats of epoxy hot on hot so that they will bond chemically.

The okoume turns a very pretty reddish brown when coated in epoxy. It's almost a shame we're going to paint it.

After the first coat the panels were moved to the shade to cure until tacky to the touch. The timing worked out perfectly so that after we gave each of the eight panels one coat, the first was ready for the second coat.

After round two of epoxy the panels were brought down to the basement to dry over night. We didn't have time to do the bulkheads so those will have to wait for another day.