Friday, September 26, 2008

Day 3 - Brick-hedge

It's 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night. Just got done with the first day of actual asembly. I took all the parts from the left side of the boat and carefully stored them to the side of the garage. Then, I lined up the pieces from the right side of the boat and tacked them into place. I didn't want to have them shift while I was glueing them togehter.


The first picture is of the top deck panel being lined up and tacked.








I've now mixed up my first 1.5 ounces of fiberglass and hardner. Pretty goopy stuff. The manual says that the resin flows better above 70 degrees. I have the garage at 72 degrees with a space heater going. Good thing I didn't go with the propane heater. In this picture, I've wetted down the joint with a disposal paint brush and placed a piece of 1.5" wide fiberglasss cloth over the top. The cloth turned almost instantly clear.





After I got the joints all glued down, I used a plastic scraper to squeeze the joint and press out any excess resin. Then I put the concrete bricks on the joints to hold them down. They are now tucked in and ready for a 8 hours of curing time. See how they are doing the in the morning. I am supposed to trim the edges of the panels when the resin has set. I thought the blocks looked like stonehedge.

3 comments:

McDowell Cycling said...

Looking good!

Fiberglass is cool to work with. I played around with it to repair the front bumper on our car a few years ago. Messy stuff.

Mike Roberts said...

I've been using rubber gloves and keeping everything as clean as possible. So far, it hasn't been too bad. When I glass the whole boat - big mess anticipated.

Alex said...

Looks like fun. Does it get real smelly from the glass??