Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Hull Extension Core in place and glassed

I realized that the core bonding material sets up much slower than the directions say. So I decided to bond all the core for the whole port side in at one time. I was afraid to do this before because of the time it takes to seal the vacuum bagging material at the edges. But when I realized that I had a lot more time to work with it I decided to go for it. With Steve mixing while I was spreading the glue we were able to get the 3 pieces up quickly. The bagging went fairly smoothly, there seems to always be problems do to the size and shape.

                                                       But we got it done.
Which is great. Before I was having to bond one piece in then glass it to create a surface to bond the bagging tape to, and then bond in the next piece. It was very slow going.

Speaking of difficult spots, I ended up cutting some of the engine room bulkhead out of the way so the bagging tape could make a smoother transition from the hull side to the top of the stringer. They had cut it too low anyway so it did not reach to the underside of the deck.
I will scarf in a piece on top of the bulkhead to bring it up to the deck. The engine room was never sealed off from the other cabins.



So today's job was to glass the inner skin on. Steve helped and we got it done in about 2 hours. There are 15 yards of glass on total in the 3 layers. I cut it into 30" widths which makes it a manageable piece to wet out. The cloth comes in 60" widths. I stagger the seams so that the seam in the first layer is in the middle of the piece of the second layer. That means that you need more time to work the glass. Let's just say that no one was sitting around during those two hours. 

I decide not to wrap the glass over the stringer on this side. It was causing a lot of extra work and did not look that great when finished. So I decided to glass down to the top of the stringer today, then add the fillet piece in the corner and glass from the inner skin down over the stringer and onto the hull below.

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