In my last post I had laid down fiberglass for a few of the bilge sections but had yet to roll any epoxy. At this point I have finished all the bilge glassing and finished all sanding but for some touch up spots.
Strong Suggestion :
Following the lead of several other builders I refrained from installing my side panels while the bilge was being glassed. I’m really glad I did it this way. I imagine crawling around in the boat and doing this would have been much more difficult.
Nonetheless, this step is still quite a chore and I’m glad to be done with it. I can also report back that the method of using the blue tape for keeping things straight and neat is pretty useful. I wouldn’t consider it a ‘must’ but fiberglass is messy as it is and the tape does seem to help with that. HOWEVER…I quickly learned not to tape the actual glass down as much as I started out doing. See picture below for example of “too much”. As you apply epoxy you’ll wind up pulling the glass sheet this way and that and you’ll want the sheet somewhat loose. Just use the tape here and there when the sheet actually needs to be temporarily held in position, like on a vertical surface…
Here are a couple of good shots. One shows how clean a section is after cutting away the blue tape. The other shows a much more appropriate use of using blue tape to hold the glass (as opposed to the above picture).
Extra Glass in the Bow
As prescribed by the manual, I added strips of 6″ wide glass to the joints in the bow flotation compartment as well as half of the storage compartment. I did this after sanding the glass sheets that were installed in those compartments. Might have been nice to have done all the glass wet at once but I’m not that quick with my glassing skills.
Left to do before painting…
There are still some nooks and crannies that need detail sanding. There are also a handful of spots that need a couple coats of epoxy where I’ve sanded down to or otherwise exposed raw wood. In particular, all the conduit and limber holes need this after being opened back up. And then of course those spots will have to be sanded.
I’ve also realized that I need to beef up the small floorboard cleat on bulkhead #8. So I will glue on an additional piece before painting. The realization came as I was dry fitting some of the floorboards and noticed that there was not much of a lip for the aft floorboard ends to rest on (this is a common refrain in the blogs). A screw into that cleat would surely split either the cleat or the board or both.
Next
Floorboards
