Fibreglassing the hull……Episode two

Second layer of glass completed! YIPPEEE!

One more to go.

Put quite a few hours in this week preparing the boat for the second layer of 450g glass. Our difficulties last week had left me with a few high spots that’s needed taking down and filling. Then the whole first layer have to be roughed up to enable the bonding with the next layer of epoxy and glass.

Another full day today, from about 9am to 4pm to complete this layer. This time I was assisted by my other son. We sped things up a little by measuring the epoxy and Hardener by volume rather than weight or using the pumps.

Slightly different technique this week, and it seemed to work much better. As the hull now has one layer of glass on it, we decided not to pre-wet the hull with epoxy before laying on the new glass. My assumption was that the first layer of glass shouldn’t be porous, unlike bare plywood, therefore we should be OK to soak the glass sufficiently using the “dry method”.

This worked out much better as we could manoeuvre the glass sheets about on the boat to get the angles and overlaps right, and ensure there were no wrinkles etc. This removed a huge amount of stress.

The 450g glass still took up a huge amount of resin, I will add it all up at some point, but we felt much more confident about the finish we would get.

So just a long day, but no problems. Fingers crossed it all looks good in the morning.