Back to work

Had a nice vacation in the woods of the Blue Ridge mountains. Got a little zip lining in, a rafting trip and some tubing on the smaller rivers. Took a week after returning to get back to work on the boat.
Anyway here we go.

Last Friday I put the form work together to lay up the flanges to support the top. The underside of the white pieces are high gloss formica so the glass work will not stick to it. the four pieces you see hanging down are to clamp it to the tank sides while I do the glass work. You can see two of the clamps on the left two pieces.

Today I was able to glass all the flanges in. It took about 2 hours of pretty intense work for each of the two tank sections. I always try to glass the four sides in in one session to they bond to together better. As you can see in this photo not all the corners are covered completely. A little grinding and then I will be able to close those little spots up. Tomorrow...hopefully

Then this afternoon I started on the two baffle plates. These are cut from reclaimed fiber glass panels. No sense in throwing away good solid fiberglass only to lay up more.
So I got them rough fitted and ground the back side down to clean solid glass. The other side is gel coat which I will grind the surface of in most and all of it off where I have to glass it in to the boat.

Feels good to be making progress again.

Back to Work

Seems like I have been busy doing everything but work on the boat the first part of this week. But I back at it with some help from Chad. I cut and spliced the top for the port side fuel tank. Then we glassed both sides of it.

We layed up 1 layer of 24 Oz. Combomat, 1 layer of 1.5 Oz. mat and 1 layer of 8 Oz. Cloth. I did it that way so that the finished surface would be smoother and require less filling and sanding to get a smooth surface. I am very pleased with the results.


















Here is a shot of the seal on the plywood which I used for the core of the top. You can see it quite clearly though the 3 layers of glass. That is the mark of good glass work.

After sanding all the edges of the taping I did in the interior of the tank I got to work on the preparations for glassing the top on.
My plan is to glass a lip onto the top of the bulkheads and the hull side which the top can rest on. When ready to put the top on I will wet out 2 layers of 1.5Oz. Mat on top of the lip all around then put the top on and press it down onto the wet glass. Then it will be glassed on the outside like the starboard tank was.

This is a shot of the underside of the form for the lip.
The main advantage of this method is that it is a lot easier to complete the inside of the tank and make sure the access covers seal well with the top off. On the starboard tank I put the inside bulkhead on last, thinking that I could glass every joint inside and out that way. I was able to reach the inside corners of the inside bulkhead though the access ports. But it was a real nightmare and then I had trouble getting the inside surface around the access port even so the covers would seal.
So this time the top goes on last.