Tonight was a most unsatisfactory night for boat building.
The day after I fiberglassed for the first time, I came out to find that in my mixing bucket, where I had left the stirring stick, I had created a faux amber: it was a hard, glassy substance with bits of detritus frozen in it. When I pulled the stirring stick out, the "amber" came out in a solid chunk.
So the second time I fiberglassed, Henry and I stuck several things in my unused epoxy: a dead fly, a fern frond, a little flower . . . I thought it might make a nice paperweight.
But evidently when you let the epoxy cure completely (for a couple of days), it doesn't come out so easily. I broke the wooden stirring stick off in the bottom of the mixing cup. So then I tried to pull out the remaining little chunk of stirring stick with a pair of pliers so that I could mix more epoxy tonight.
I braced the cup tightly in one hand and pulled with the pliers in my other hand.
The wood came out.
Well, part of the wood came out. The stirrer broke into a jagged shard, and part of it came out and lodged itself deep into the heel of my left hand.
It's not a very dramatic looking wound for the violence that went into it. (I mopped it up and went to the dinner table, where Charlie asked why I had blood splattered on my forehead. And my shirt)
The plus side of this, of course, is that it shows the epoxy REALLY set well. That's great news. I unstacked the sideboards and bottom piece and checked them out.
Now, Fred had told me that when he does fiberglassing projects, he will sometimes put a layer of waxed paper on top of the finished glasswork to keep it dust-free and smooth. I've done that, but I just end up shredding the waxed paper, which does not peel nicely off of the cured resin. Anyway, I sanded down both sides of the sideboards, and they seemed really good. Really strong. SO strong, in fact, that I mocked up the boat again (without clamping the sideboards together), and took this picture:
So far, so good. It's supposed to rain the next couple of days, so I thought I'd stick the joined pieces in the garage for safekeeping. I stacked the sideboards and laid them in the garage. It fit perfectly.
Then I went to pick up the bottom piece and (you guessed it): CRACK.
The seam split.
This is when I said a LOT of bad words.
Well, check that: I said one bad word, a lot of times. Many, MANY times. An incalculable number of times.
I stormed around, my palm throbbing a bit, and re-covered the bottom piece with the plastic sheeting and came inside.
It's not the end of the world: I can still join the sideboards to the stems this weekend. And I'll re-glass the bottom piece AGAIN this weekend, and so it should be ready to attach the following weekend. I guess I rushed it tonight.
Frustrating, but not fatal.
Unless, of course, my puncture wound gets some kind of staph infection.
Maybe this boat is going to kill me.
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