Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Day 35 - Quiet time

Tonight was a quiet night full of work and learning. When I got in I discovered that the first panel was covered with tiny bubbles and the fiberglass had slightly "floated". The floating is not a problem, although I don't want it to happen again and I know that it happened because I used to much resin. As to the bubbles, I was somewhat mystified as typically you get bubbles when the temperature is rising while the resin is curing causing entrapped air in the wood to come out, but the temperature in the shed is fairly constant and definitely on the cooler side at 60 degrees.

The solution? Scrape the bubbles down level with the rest of the surface and apply another coating of resin to fair everything out. After scraping the panels I also scraped the stringers and the shelf and set them to the side.

Next I set up the sawhorses to allow me to get the first panel up off the floor and set up for two more panels. I then had to shuffle the 1/2" ply for the hull bottom around (again) to get to the other side panels. Once that was done I set two of the three side panels up on the sawhorses and started mixing resin.

First I mixed up a batch for the original panel and leveled it out. Then I started the second panel. Two batches of resin got the plywood coated, a third gave me something to set the cloth in. After rolling out the cloth I used the roller to smooth it out and push the fiberglass down into the resin. A fourth batch of resin was used to fill in the dry spots and lo and behold guess what started to show up? Yep, those bubbles. It appears that pushing the fiberglass down into the resin pushes the air back up and the resin is too thick to allow the bubbles to pop. A quick swipe over the top with a small squeegee popped the bubbles.

Last I started work on the third panel. I repeated basically the same steps as on the second panel with the same bubbles problem, but I used less resin, so less bubbles. I think the trick is using less resin than I've been trying to use and only adding it as needed after the fiberglass is on. I'm getting better at this so we'll see how the fourth panel goes.

I'm also going to have to go back to the book for some research. I'm glassing the inside of the side panels right now. I may take a hard look at glassing the outside of the panels while on the flat versus once they're actually built in place. Glassing on an angle is no fun!


One full shed!


Oops! Almost blocked myself in!

4.5 Hours