Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Fiber glassing the hulls

Now that the hulls are assembled they won't fit back into the basement any more. It's been ok to keep them outside so far but the sunshine won't last forever so we are moving up the fiber glassing job to protect them while they are out in the weather.

The paint job looks a bit messy up on the saw horses but all those areas won't show.


All the stitches are out and the keel has been rounded over so we can put a piece of glass tape along the keel joint. This area is going to get the most abuse pulling the boat up on beaches so it gets a triple layering of fiberglass. The first layer is this tape and then the two side pieces will overlap over keel as well. We also put a bead of epoxy down to build up the radius and add more protection to the wooden keel strip.


Next we unrolled the 4oz fiberglass over the size of the hull and tacked it in place some epoxy where we couldn't hold it with tape.


Then we finally got down to spreading on the epoxy. We had been dreading the fiber glassing job and what would happen if we messed it up but it really wasn't that bad.


The fiberglass cloth does want to wrinkle as it laps over the curved edge of the keel but we kept at it and got all the wrinkles spread out.


The fiberglass also wraps up onto the skeg  and smooths out the transition. This area is probably going to require some filler and sanding later but is looking pretty good.


We also had to notch the cloth around the lash pad supports. We ended up just glassing down to the edge and trimming with a razor blade which made a pretty clean edge.


Then we just had to keep moving back between the two hull as each fiberglass job cured.