I layed the glass on the hull Thursday night. It's surprisingly well behaved, moving enough to go around curves without wrinkling. You use a small hand sweeping brush to get it to lay along the hull.
Today was the day to finish the job. The weather did not help things out. The rate of the epoxy reaction is very temperature dependent. Manufactures make different hardeners with different set times so that based on the air temperature you can get you mix to stay workable for long enough, but not take forever to fully cure. During the summer I used the slow hardener because of the heat. To give myself more working time I would often cool my cup of goo in ice water while working with it, which worked well. I debated getting the medium hardener for the hull, but when I checked the forecast and saw overnight lows in the 50s with a daytime high in the low 70s I decided to go with the slow. The need to get multiple coats on in a day required pushing things to the too fast side. However, the forecast was a little off. Last night only got down to about 60 and the high today was 79. I helped offset this by refrigerating the epoxy last night. That kept it cool all morning which was great, as the initial wet-out was slow.
One of Collyn's writer friends came over to help out. He is an amateur word worker, a bit envious of the boat build, and had never played around with fiberglass. We had a fun couple hours pushing goo around with plastic spreaders. It took about 2.5 hours to do the initial wet out. The big time sink was working it in around the gunwale. It took work to get the glass to stay on the fillet while wetting out the face of the gunwale. However, we did a fairly nice job of it, though it's hard to tell in the picture.
I waited several hours between coats, letting it get tacky before using a small roller to roll on another coat. Each of the additional coats took less than an hour, and then I did a final coat with a sponge brush as it looked like the weave wasn't fully filled. I then gave it a drag with a dry foam brush to smooth things out. I'd worked out an estimate for the epoxy needed from a calculation from the Gougeon Bros epoxy book, and came in a little under that so I'm hoping I hit the sweet spot between not enough to fill the weave, and too much that will require turning expensive epoxy into expensive dust. There are some imperfect spots, as by the time the final coat went on this evening the garage (and the epoxy) was above 70, so some of it was already gelling on the hull before I got it fully smoother.
I did have one major failing. I wanted to get the transom glassed as well, but for some reason never recognized that I still needed to round the corners where it joins the hull so the glass would go around the corner. It wasn't until I wet out the transom glass that I realized my omission. It left small air pockets along the edges. I decided to let it set some and see if I could press the glass down into the setting epoxy, forcing it to take the bend. It worked, but only for a few minutes, so I ended up pulling it all off. It will require a little extra sanding work, but there's nothing that can't be fixed as if I'd done it right to begin with. Once the hull job fully sets I'll round the edges and then glass the transom at the same time I glass the rudder and centerboard, which means I need to shape the rudder this week.
As you can see in the photos I put down some newspaper to try and keep drips off the floor. I used newspaper instead of plastic because I wanted something it could soak into some as I knew I would end up walking in it some as well. I wasn't sure how much it would end up soaking through and sticking to the garage floor. It wasn't too bad, but again, given the quicker setting time, I've got some floor cleanup to do with a heat gun.
