There's a hole in my boat!

[Project_Mayhem]

Here's a quick update. I finished the puck. There's some lines on it from plastic wrap. Ill add some resin to fill them in. I scuffed it up a bit to help with adhesion and eliminate any chance of an amine blush.

The bow is made of some heavy woven fabric with a lot of highs and lows in it. I sanded it down to try to get all of the bilge paint off. It's totally smooth but I'm afraid of taking away too much fiberglass just to get the small specs of paint

I enlarged and smoothed the taper on the outside. Despite all the effort I don't think I'm going to be able to get more than 2-3 layers of 1708 in there

 

[Project_Mayhem]

I managed to get a lot done over the past two days. I taped the puck on the outside and injected thickened epoxy at the edges. At the time it didn't seem like the epoxy filled the entire gap and I was beginning to think beveling one or both edges would've been a better way to go. After doing this step I felt that the disc was solidly taped in place so I started glassing layers of fabric on the inside.

I got a great deal on some TotalBoat epoxy so I decided to use that for this project. I'm not sure if its the resin itself or the fact that my jug of west resin has seen a wide variety of temperatures and many miles in my trunk but there are almost no air bubbles with the TotalBoat epoxy. It also helped that I used paper plates. The two tools I found very valuable were a fiberglass roller and a large plastic paint scraper. The latter was used like a spatula to handle the wet fabric. While I did go a little overboard with the size of the patch the overall result was good

This morning I started laying fabric on the outside of the hull. @dlochner you were right that too much resin can cause the fabric to not stick to the hull. I did what I could with the roller that was all gunked up with resin from the day before. I had one plate for mixing and soaking the the other for rolling excess out. Plates were changed out as soon as I saw resin start to gel. The roller didn't work well on the concave shape of the ground hull. I ended up using my fingers to push the air bubbles out. I stopped a layer or two shy of being even with the rest of the hull.

@dlochner I remember you mentioned that the last layer would be sacrificial. Do you add some thickened epoxy for shaping/fairing at the very end?

 

[dlochner]

@dlochner I remember you mentioned that the last layer would be sacrificial. Do you add some thickened epoxy for shaping/fairing at the very end?

No the thickened epoxy is fairing compound. The final layer of glass will be a little proud of the hull. Then sand it smooth, apply fairing compound, sand smooth, repeat as necessary. Typically it takes several passes with fairing compound to get it right. It is sort of like doing dry wall and taping seams. You think you have it all covered and then you find a spot you missed.

 

[Project_Mayhem]

The multiple passes made me think I was doing it wrong on past projects. Thanks Dave!