Well, after all the sanding the past couple days it was a pleasure to do something else.
I started the day by putting a second coat of paint on the inside and bottom of the radar mount; then epoxy, peanut butter and fiberglass to mount it on the roof.
I've kinda painted myself into a corner on this one. :-) It's going to be a while before I can finish this. But it is up there. While I was up on the cuddy roof I put a second coat of paint on the front of the arch and then used a little of the left over peanut butter to fill the holes on the bottom of the arch.
I inadvertently discovered a brand new (to me at least) and much faster way to put down fiberglass today.
I picked up a contractor pack of 1/4" nap 6.5" long tiny rollers at Home Depot for painting. I was getting ready to put down the second layer of glass on my cuddy roof and needed a way to spread out the epoxy and decided to try one of these instead of the larger roller I've used in the past.
That worked well. I laid down the glass and needed to add some more epoxy to hit the dry spots and was doing it with the brush, but had a larger area to fill so tried the roller. Wow! It worked so well I used it to roll the entire piece of fiberglass and it did a great job pushing the glass into the epoxy and spreading the excess epoxy instead of leaving really wet spots like would happen if I used the brush.
I continued to use it for all the rest of the glass work I did today and it made such a difference that I ended up finishing what I'd planned to do in five and a half hours instead of ten.
So, for the glass work today I put down two pieces of triax on the cuddy roof running bow to stern, slightly overlapping in the middle and running down over the sides. I also continued the fiberglass on the sides going back towards the stern using the precut pieces from a few weeks ago. Last I put a small strip across the front of the cuddy.
Next up was filling the weave on the older fiberglass. More epoxy and using the roller I worked my way around the boat filling in. I tried to be very careful filling the fiberglass that wrapped over the hull so that I didn't end up with any drips. That area got rolled several times tonight.
I wanted to fill the weave on the new fiberglass but that required letting the epoxy set up, so I went and ate, did some browsing at Western Auto and bought a couple things at Home Depot. After about three hours I went back to the shed, mixed a final couple batchs of epoxy and filled the weave on all the new fiberglass.
Shiny!
What was left of the epoxy was used to coat the strips on the side of the roof and the undersides of the eaves. That is going to be a pain to deal with, but I'm going to have to figure out a way to sand it smooth.
7 Hours