Joining with Fiberglass

Well, it's done.

I did elect to go outside for construction, and I just got a very gratifying validation from Fred:

I'll try to make this quick so as to not be left behind: building outside is always better than building inside, even if conditions might suggest otherwise. And, after all, you're building a boat, not a chess set.

Good point. Right now, the rain will hold off until around 9:00 tonight. Says Fred,

If the weather turns before the cure is complete, you can still carefully move the pieces to a sheltered location to allow the chemical process to finish at its own pace.

That may be more challenging than you'd suppose, although I'm sure Fred's thought about it. I have two 8' x 28" pieces of plywood, end to end, with what feels like scotch tape holding them together. I think picking them up before it's rock-solid and the joint will bend, and it will be ruined.

In any event, here's what I had at 8:00 AM:From left, two rubrails, two 8'x28" bottom pieces, laid end to end, and two sets of 8'x10" sideboards, paired up and laid end to end.

And, here's the same view at 10:00 AM:The same pieces (minus the rubrails, which were moved into the garage [rear]), after being joined with fiberglass and covered with protective plastic.

I wish I had pictures of the process for you, but fiberglassing is a messy job, and I didn't want to get my phone all epoxy-y. The glass itself is very easy to work with: it's in a big roll, like fabric, and cuts easily with scissors. There were no jagged edges on which to cut myself - it was very straightforward. The epoxy comes in two jugs, a big one (the epoxy) and a smaller one (the hardener), which are mixed on a 2-to-1 ratio. I measured by pouring into a cheap plastic measuring cup I got a the hardware store and then carefully pouring back and forth between the measuring cup and a mixing bucket. (This is the recommended way of mixing according to the epoxy instructions.) I also stirred with a wooden paint stirrer.

I had pre-cut the fiberglass to the size I want (a piece large enough to cover about 8" on either side of the joint, wrapping around the entire boards and overlapping a bit). I painted on the epoxy, laid on the fiberglass and pressed and painted until the glass was saturated with epoxy, smoothing out to the edges and working my way around. I then painted another layer of epoxy over the top, smoothed, and set. I covered the epoxied fiberglass with waxed paper, wrapped in the plastic sheeting, and weighted down.

Did I do a neat, tidy job?
I'll be honest. No. I did not. It was messy and amateurish.
Wanna know why? Because I'm a messy amateur.

But the point is that I used plenty of epoxy and had plenty of overlap on each board. I believe what is going to make this joint hard is the epoxy itself: according to what I've read, epoxy is much stronger than almost anything you can join with it: if you glue two pieces of any strong material together with the correct type of epoxy and let it completely set to 100% cure, if you then stress the joint, the original material will fail before the epoxy joint does. So I think the fiberglass fabric is essentially just a way of holding the epoxy together until it gets hard enough.

In any event, my plan is to let these joints completely cure, then set up the sawhorses and sand down the messiness of the joints to some reasonable smoothness, and then use the final layers of fiberglass (when the boat structure is completed) to make it smooth and pretty.

My main concern at this point is that the epoxy will want to stick to the waxed paper/plastic sheeting as much as it wants to stick to the wood, and when I unwrap the big burrito it will all come apart. But I'll jump off that bridge when I get to it.

I think I'm going to "seal" the edges of the plastic burrito with gaff tape (is there anything gaff tape can't do?) before leaving today. (We head out to Charlie's baseball game around 5:00, and we're going out for my birthday pizza afterwards, and it will likely be raining by then time we get home. I'm going to just leave the epoxy burrito untouched until tomorrow afternoon. (It's going to be done raining around 6:00 AM, and then it should be sunny the rest of the day.))

(Fred also responded to my defying his sail plan advice, but I'll save that for a later post. I would just like to reaffirm that I would never even have ordered the kit and imagined I could possibly build a boat were it not for my assumption of Fred's advice and support. So the fact that I may not follow it to the letter should not be construed as meaning that his recommendations are not correct, and better than my decisions. It's more an indication of my stubbornness and unwarranted idealism.)

Note: upon proof-reading these posts, I've noticed I really like parentheses. Sorry about that.