Fiberglassing Sucks

Sorry. Not a very polite title there, huh?

After 39 years, I've come to know myself. I'm good at some things. Like Excel. And . . . um . . . well, I'm really good at Excel.

What I'm not good at? Detail-oriented projects that require patience and quality physical craftsmanship.

Guess what fiberglassing is? It's a detail-oriented project that requires patience and quality craftsmanship.

It started so promising. I decided to do the "tricky" parts first: the pointy ends. I cut enough cloth to cover the first two feet of boat, and then trimmed it down and cut "darts" (if that's the word I want) to overlap the cloth over the bendy parts. I mixed up a litte epoxy, added a little sawdust for coloring, spread it over the hull, laid out the cloth, applied more epoxy, and squeegeed it down.

And, in truth, the first pointy end went pretty smoothly.

So I did the other pointy end. Pretty much the same process, pretty much the same result. Flat application, pretty smooth and clean.

Then I tried to do a bigger piece for the main body of the boat. Larger cut of fiberglass, more epoxy. This is where it started going badly. I should have used much smaller pieces to cover the boat carfully. The "stringers" on the bottom and sides created air pockets under the glass, and when I worked hard to get one out, it would appear somewhere else. The epoxy started hardening, and so I had to work more quickly. Much less perfection than the ends.

But, in the end, the entire hull was covered in glass and epoxy. It is messy in parts, but that just means sanding down and doing patches here and there. It's not the end of the world. Just like glassing the original pieces (in my failed butt joints): you have to start somewhere and then build off of that. The building process is, as Fred told me at the start of this, mostly just a matter of fixing screw-ups. And, to quote him further:

And when you are ready for that final phase, remember that fibreglass and epoxy resin, augmented with assorted thickeners and enhancers, can adequately address any and all perceived deficiencies, aesthetic and otherwise.

My biggest concern now is that I'm getting low on epoxy/hardener. I should have enough to re-coat the whole bottom and do the inside. But I'll need to get more before I can make changes and additions (like cutting the end of the boat and adding a transom.)

But first things first. I want to finish the boat (and by "finish" I mean "make watertight") tomorrow so that it can hit the water on Sunday.

Some pics from yesterday:

Above you see the first go at fiberglassing. I mixed four different batches of epoxy, each with a slightly different proportion of sawdust, hence the variegated color. I kind of like the different hues. After I get it sanded down and apply the covering coat, this should be somewhat evened out. (You can see the edges of fiberglass (white cloth) hanging down below the rubrails, towards the ground.) Yes, the pointy end in the foreground was glassed, too. It just had the least amount of sawdust mixed in to the epoxy so is a lighter color.)

As I was finishing up, a major thunderstorm rolled in, but I couldn't cover the boat, as the plastic would stick to the EXTREMELY TACKY epoxy. So I had to build a tent:
One thing I didn't mention is how great it is to build a boat barefoot. Until my last day of construction (when I sanded it down last weekend), I had done all of the construction shod. But last weekend, I worked on the boat barefoot, and it was really great. So I continued barefoot yesterday.

Not so great, as I ended up epoxying grass and dirt and seedpods to my bare feet.
I had to soak my feet in acetone to clean this off. Whoops.