May 2013

On May 5^th I started to fiber glass the Port side of the hull. I spread out the fiber glass along the hull’s length with the top edge aligned with the keel line. I found that I needed to weight down the fiber glass so that it won’t slip off the hull but guess what, the weights slipped so I attached the fiber glass edge with yellow painter’s tape. The yellow tape is for gentle surfaces and doesn’t have as much sticky backing as the blue tape. Likewise I used squeeze clamps to maintain the fiber glass along the hull’s sheer. I then trimmed the fiber glass along the sheer’s edge to within 2 inches of the sheer. I found that I needed to use 60 “squirts “of the epoxy resin/hardener to completely fill the fiber glass. Out of curiosity I wanted to determine the amount of epoxy used and determined that 60 “squirts” of epoxy resin equals 60 oz. of resin or 3.75 quarts and 30 oz. of hardener or 1.875 quarts. Therefore based on these measurements it took 7.5 quarts of resin and 3.75 quarts of hardener to completely fiber glass the hull plus I used 32 feet of fiber glass. At the start of the fiber glassing I used 4” foam rollers but found that the rollers left too many little air bubbles so I stopped using the foam rollers and used one of those ‘throw away’ china bristle paint brushes. I found that the 4” brushes worked great as I was able to work the epoxy into the fiber glass weave and create both a completely absorbed and smooth finish.  Once the epoxy hardened I left the hull alone for 2 days. Then I removed the “epoxy blush” by lightly sanding the fiber glass and wiping it with denatured alcohol.  Then over the next few days I applied an additional coat of epoxy to the entire hull to both fill in any gaps and to even out the surface. To achieve a smooth epoxy coating on the hull I sanded it with 80 grit sandpaper on a five inch orbital sander. Over the course of 2 days it took 3.5 hours to sand the hull.

I decided that I would use Interlux paint as the final top coat for both the boat’s exterior hull and the interior of the boat. With this in mind, I contacted the technical advisors at Jamestown Distributors and asked them what type of primer I should use. After telling them about the boat’s construction they suggested that I use Interlux 2000E Perfection for the primer. Well, this is a 2 part epoxy primer with a large amount of microballons in the paint with a strong solvent based smell.  Wearing my carbon filter respirator was required and I didn’t smell anything during the whole process.