The next day I spent the morning carefully sanding the entire bottom of the boat again with both 80-grit and 120-grit sandpaper. I also did quite a bit of hand sanding, trying to get everything reasonably smooth. By mid-afternoon I was ready to appply first full coat of fiberglass. As suggested in the manual, I used a roller to spread a very thin coat of fiberglass. As a result there was no problem with drips, but I’m not absolutely positive about having covered every inch of wood. The roller does leave little bubbles so I used a foam brush to tip them out. To my eye the coat looked smooth -- though one could still see the places beneath this coat where previous drips and smears had been. The boat looked quite acceptable from about 10 - 15 feet, and I wanted it to look much better by the time I finished the third coat. My plan was to sand with 100-grit paper between the second and the third coats.
After applying the second coat of epoxy covering the entire bottom of the hull, I was a bit concerned that the surface was not very smooth. Bits of dust turned into hard fiberglass speckles and in places even the grain of the plywood itself absorbed fiberglass and stood on end almost like specks of sand. I decided to give this a few days to dry and then proceed with a thorough sanding, but I was beginning to doubt that I would ever get to a smooth mirror finish. From a distance the hull looked just fine, but it felt like sandpaper to rub your hand across it.
Fiberglass takes about five days to harden fully and be ready for a thorough sanding. In the interim I plugged away on other pieces -- the skeg, the rudder, the daggerboard, the mast step, the daggerboard well, the mast, and the spars. Attaching the skeg required having Sue hold it centered and square, while I drilled holes from the bottom. It was then glued and strengthened with fillets. Despite our best efforts, there seemed to be a slight curve when sighting along the skeg from the stern toward the bow, so I had to fix that with some aggressive work with the belt sander.
The rudder, too, was a challenge. Shaping it was not too difficult as it just requires bullet curves on its edges. But the the yoke was a problem. It took some sanding, rasping, and chiseling to get it to fit, and then a small shim to make it snug. I propped it up and put a coat of fiberglass on as much as I could, And then I made my mistake. Instead of waiting for that fiberglass to dry, I went right on to mix thickened glue for the sturdy fillets that hold it together. Unfortunately the fiberglass under the fillets was very slippery and fashioning the fillets turned into a big mess. Patience and perseverance prevailed, and eventually I ended up with adequate fillets.
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| Daggerboard well, rudder, and mast step |
The mast and spars have been thoroughly sanded and are almost ready for varnish. (I still need to drill holes in them.) And I am nearly ready to glue together the mast foot and the daggerboard well.
The thwarts were first glued together and then sanded smooth on the pretty side (which will be up). I bought a spokeshave and gradually learned how to use it while creating the chamfers on the edges of the thwarts. The spokeshave creates long curlicues of shavings . . . ideal for "little Orphan Annie" curls on a corn doll!
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| Spokeshave and Thwart |
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| Fiberglassed thwarts |
With the fiberglass on the bottom fully dry I was ready for sanding. First I spent a couple of hours using the paint scraper to scrape all the rough spots and drips on the bottom. I created some pretty good piles of fiberglass in this process, but it did make the hull much smoother. Unfortunately, the scraping also put a few minor scratches all the way into the fiberglass cloth.
A full day of sanding using both the orbital sander and hand sanding was necessary to smooth everything to my satisfaction (though I did sand all the way down to bare wood in a few spots). Then I spent about a hour sweeping and vacuuming the garage to get rid of dust -- clouds and billows of dust!
Finally, I was ready to apply the first of (I think) two thin coats of finish fiberglass. I used a chip brush to slather on the fiberglass, a paint roller to spread it into a thin coat, and the chip brush once again to smooth out the bubbles. It was a painstaking and slow process, but the end result is a very satisfactory fiberglass coat. In most places it is mirror smooth, marred only by occasional specks of dust and one unfortunate fly. I think the finish is smooth enough that I tempted to leave the bottom of the boat "bright." It's that good! (At least to my untutored and uncritical eye!)
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| Fiberglassed Hull |
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| Close-up of the fly in the fiberglass |
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