Moving Right Along...well moving anyway

I was able to bond the first piece of core on the transom in this morning. I figured out that the vacuum leaks were in the poor original glass work on the horizontal stringer. So I added two layers of Mat and Roving which sealed it up really well. I believe I covered that in the last post.

So here is the panel at the start of the vacuum process.
I kept the vacuum at 15 PSI for about an hour.That works out to a little over one ton of pressure on each Square Foot.......

                The gauge on the left is showing the vacuum pressure.

An hour later it had pulled some of the liquid from the bonding paste through the core to the other surface. I guess 10 PSI would be a enough.....

Here is the same panel with the inner layers of glass. The darker sections to the left are two layers thick. I stagger the joints between layers so the joint in one layer is in the middle of the section of the next layer. Next I will bond in the other piece of core and then glass it.

 I wrapped the inner skin of glass down and over the horizontal stringer. The second layer overlaps the first below the stringer. Now glass on the stringer is about 3/8" thick!

Here you can see the various parts of the whole layup. At the bottom right you can see the original 4 layers of glass bonding the stringer to outer layer of fiberglass. The white vertical part is the 1" thick Nida-Core, the light colored piece emerging from under the glass work at the lower right is the foam fillet between the inside face of the core and the top of the stringer and finally to the left are the two layers of glass. The second layer over laps the first one below the stringer. It's a lot of work but very strong.