Glassing the Hull

I was a bit worried that I didn't have enough fiberglass for the hull, but after measuring out a piece of my 60" wide roll as long as the entire hull I realized I had way more than enough. The tallest part of the hull side was 30", so I cut the piece down the middle and laminated those pieces to the sides using a foam roller from the nearby Lowes home improvement store.


I thought I'd need a helper to do this, but rolling on epoxy at the top of the strip of cloth worked well to hold it in place.


Then it was just a matter of rolling out the rest of the cloth. I mixed up about 4 16 ounce cups of epoxy to do both sides. Seemed like a lot. Now that I've sanded the sides I realized a lot of that epoxy got sanded off.


After doing the sides I did the bottom. Here's the rough cut cloth laid on the bottom.


Then trimmed to size.


And laminated on. I added a second layer of glass on the front half of the bottom for better abrasion resistance when beaching it.


Here's the hull after sanding the bottom, the transom and one side. What a major pain in the butt it is to sand this, even with a good random orbital sander. I ended up using 60 grit paper on a foam backed sanding block (a re-purposed grout spreader with a nice handle) prior to using the random orbital sander. It's a lot of work to get rid of all those shiny low spots. Seriously tedious work. With the hand sanding it makes for an awesome upper body workout though.


One more entire side to go still. SIGH.


I bought another 3 gallon kit of Raka epoxy with the no blush hardener. Read about this trick of draining the remains of the old bottles into the new. Was SUPER careful about not mixing up the bottles!