Thursday, May 28, 2009

Dave's Disposable Glove Corollary


I have now fiberglassed most of the inner hull and have discovered a corollary to the boat building you can never have too many clamps theorem. When fiberglassing you can never have too many disposable gloves. I have now so far literally used more than a hundred pairs of disposable gloves for all of the epoxy and fiberglass work on the boat. I tend to change gloves frequently because I always seem to be sticking to something. You know the warnings on super glue packages not to get the glue on your skin; they are directed at people like me. 
My fiberglassing technique is slowly improving but I still have fiberglass threads interfering on the cut edges of the fabric and I am finding that Mr. Gravity can create some very large drips and runs of low viscosity epoxy. In the first picture you can see where I have sanded off the rough spots on the second coat before I apply a third coat of epoxy.
The spring evening weather is still unseasonably cool and I am leaving a heater on in the garage overnight to maintain a more consistent temperature for curing the epoxy.

I removed part of bulkhead 7  even though the Pocketship manual instructs you to remove most of it after all the hull fiberglassing is done. It seemed the only way to overlap the fiberglass easily and plus there is one little section where there is a gap in the side  panel/ hull fillet that needed to be filled in.

This is the inside of the bow watertight compartment. It is fiberglassed 5 or 6 inches above the side panel/hull joint and also has 9 oz. fiberglass tape running up the stem and reinforcing the side panel hull joint. This was the nastiest compartment to fiberglass. There is no easy access and standing on a step stool I almost felt like I was going to tumble inside trying to stretch and reach the bottom.  The piece of wood on the left is just a temporary spacer for the lower breasthook which would have made accessing the compartment for fiberglass even more difficult. Soon this compartment will be filled up with flotation foam and sealed up hopefully for all time.

4 comments:

Steve said...

Very nice indeed... I fear the sanding that I will have to encounter when I stary my build.. Seems daunting... NICE PICS! and good read on a Friday morning for me.

Dave C. said...

The sanding can be tedious but I put my iPod on, my respirator, and then my big hearing protection ear muffs and it isn't so bad. With the music on and the ear muffs I can barely hear the vacuum and sander.

Unknown said...

I will have to insulate my garage door, and I'm considering covering the ice-cold concrete floor with plywood. What kind of a heater are you using in your garage? I'm looking at buying two or three portable electric baseboard heaters (1500 Watt each) from a big box store.

Dave C. said...

I used a cheap 1500 potable heater with a fan but found I probably got just as much heat from leaving on the double halogen worklight I had in the garage. I wasn't really using the heaters to make the garage workable in the winter but just to keep the temperature up a bit in our cool spring overnight weather.
Evidently if you really want to heat up a garage the best solution is a garage heater that goes on a 220 volt plug if you have that kind of circuit in your garage.