Plywood Boat Plans | Fiberglass Fill Coat

Plywood Boat Plans

At this point, we have the fiberglass bonded to the boat with a layer of epoxy.  The texture of the cloth is still quite visible, so we have to add enough epoxy that it is invisibly hidden.

Since by now we are grizzled veterans of fiberglassing, the work was not so stressful and only required a team of two -- one person to mix and deliver the epoxy to the other person who is applying it with a dense foam roller.

 We had to work quickly on a hot day to apply the epoxy before it kicked off. 

Then we went around and brushed over any drips or places where it was funky.  We had varying success preventing drips.  Later we noticed plenty of places where it required work with a sander to make sure the next coat was smooth.

Each day after we finished a fill or finish coat we were pretty sure our work was done and that the texture of the underlying cloth was invisible.

And each work day when we returned, we could still see the texture of the cloth through the previous coat.  So we were obligated to add another finish coat.  Rinse.  Repeat.

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Dinghy Boat Plans | Hockey Puck Manufacture or Epoxy is Stressful II

Dinghy Boat Plans

Did I mention that epoxy is stressful?  To recap:  You have 15 to 30 minutes to get a bucket full of epoxy mixed, applied, and secured down before it turns into a rock-hard mistake that must be laboriously chipped, chiseled, and sanded off. 

Add to that, less than ideal conditions of 95°F days and adding a thickening filler that reduces the epoxy pot-life by a huge factor. 

During our days of mixing thickened epoxy (to adhere joints together and fill gaps), we inadvertently manufactured many hockey pucks in the bottom of our mixing containers. 

But by far the most interesting mistake I made was one one particularly hot day that I made a triple batch.  I broke the batch down into three containers, and successfully used the first batch before realizing that the other two batches had already begun to gel.  One of the three had kicked off dramatically and begun to melt through the plastic mixing container.  I set it out in the yard somewhere safe.

"Before Its Time"  2012.  Mixed Media: Plastic, epoxy resin, natural materials.

It formed an interesting, uh, sculpture as all the epoxy melting through the bottom oozed into and solidified around various bits of yard mulch.

Here is out collection of hockey pucks and sculptures weve created.  As we move to finishing the hull, well be mixing thin batches with no filler, so the likelihood of unexpected epoxy disasters decreases.

This is what a long day of working with epoxy does to me.


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Yacht Boat Plans | Fiberglass Seal Coat

Yacht Boat Plans

We fretted over fiberglassing the hull so much, we put off beginning with this step for weeks.  We read and reread our instructions from Glen-L, Ken Hankinson Fiberglass Boatbuilding book, and anything else we could find.  We went over scenarios and thought of terrible things that could go wrong.  We thought it would be so harrowing and difficult, that in the end, it was a bit of letdown.

Heres where we left the boat last time.  Filled, shimmed, routed, sanded lovingly.  Lawrence came by a couple times and asked, "What are you building, a boat or a piece of fine furniture?"

Before we started the day, we had to wipe the whole boat down and make sure there was no sawdust, grease, debris, or anything anywhere.

But really, this was just the seal coat, the first of four or five coats wed put on the hull.  We wouldnt even get out the glass cloth until the next coat.

And now a quick primer on fiberglass:  Fiberglass is a composite laminate material.  The layer(s) of spun glass cloth or mat embedded in a matrix of polyester or epoxy resin are what gives it strength.

In some boats where the hull derives its strength from the fiberglass, it is typical to use alternating layers of mat (a loosely woven nest of randomly aligned spun glass) and glass cloth.  In our boat, the fiberglass covering on the plywood hull served only the purpose of keeping it watertight and creating a durable wear-resistant maintenance-free surface.  So we had only to put one layer of glass cloth between several layers of epoxy.

There are many methods of applying fiberglass to a boat hull, but they break down to the so-called wet and dry methods.  "Wet" means the fiberglass cloth (or mat) is laid over a just applied layer of resin and then "wet out" with more resin on top.  This sounded hectic. We imagined laying cloth over a wet sticky layer of resin and fighting wrinkles and having the cloth misaligned and pulling our hair out and getting sticky head to foot.

We were relieved to discover in our Glen-L instructions that they recommended the dry method.  "Dry" means simply that the first coat is rolled out without the cloth and allowed to set.  Then the cloth layer is laid out over this dry layer and more resin on top of that to wet it out.  This allows us to carefully align the cloth without the stress of either sticky goo or the ticking clock.

In this first seal coat, all we were doing was covering the hull with epoxy.  Kai mixed up big batches of epoxy and put them in paint trays for me to roll out with a dense foam roller.

Then Kai came around with extra resin and touched up spots Id hit too lightly and brushed down any air bubbles.  Because we werent mixing the resin with filler, it had a longer pot-life and so didnt tend to kick off early, even though we were mixing it in larger quantities.

The result was beautiful, though vaguely reminiscent of a horribly outdated style of 70s handmade varnished pine bedroom furniture.

Though it was a hot day in the barnyard, we were feeling pretty good about our work and the results.


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