Glassing Pictures

First up is my epoxy stir stick. Add a cheap battery powered drill and a good pair of protective goggles and you can go to town on stirring your epoxy.


Here you can see the corner where the glass lifted, I have cut away the lifted glass. I will sand this down and patch it up later.

When you add the epoxy, the glass becomes almost transparent. You can see the pattern of the weave, which apparently is about right. Too much epoxy in the first pass, and the glass will float off the ply.

Alway wear overalls, goggles, gloves and impermeable shoes when you start slopping epoxy around. The stuff gets everywhere.

Imagine if these had been sneakers, I might have found out later when I tried to take them off that the epoxy had soaked through and bonded my shoes and socks to my feet.

Centerboard case in progress...

The first glassing went well.

It's amazing to see what was a white opaque glass cloth become transparent with the application of a litte epoxy. The grain of the ply looks wonderful. I still need a second layer of epoxy to fill the weave. Apparently that's the way it should be, too much epoxy in the first pass, and the cloth floats off the wood.

I need to fix a corner where the glass lifted a little. I see my first practice at lapping glass cloth. Wish me luck.

D

Starting the Centerboard Case

Now that the new shed is in place, and all the boat parts are out of the kitchen (really) I've started back at work on the boat. I have more free space in the new shed, then total space in the old shed.

I took one side of the centerboard case and made an attempt at glassing it. Later today I will know how well it went. It's like the good old days of film cameras, when you had to wait to see the result of your work.

I had no idea of how much to mix, but since I was working on a small area, I was not too worried about the epoxy setting up while I mixed up more. I can see that for a large area, having an assistant to do the mixing would help.

I had left the cloth long around the edges of the plywood panel, but as I squeeged in the epoxy, the weight of the hanging cloth was causing the it to lift just inside the edge of the plywood, in much the same way as if I was trying to glass a right angle, once I trimed the cloth to an inch or so, it was fine.

Now I simply have to wait till it sets up, and see if it had made a good bond, or not. Then I'll bang on another layer of epoxy and see how it all looks.

Pictures will of course follow.

I have shed my shed

In the quest for more room for high speed, sharp, spinning thing I have decided to move up from an 8 x 6 shed to a 10 x 8 shed.

Now all my stuff is in the attic - moving it up two flights of stairs must constitute my exercise quota for the day.

You would think that knocking down a leaky, somewhat rotten shed would be trivial. The down side it that it's only rotten in places.

In order to fit it in a mini skip, I need to break it up pretty small. This takes a whole lot more effort than you would expect. I really wanted to avoid using power tools since all this wood is treated with nasty preservatives, and I did not want to leave fine toxic sawdust in my back garden.

Now I wait for the new shed to arrive, and I catch up on my Maths degree. Boat work may be delayed a little.... 8-(