Hull Work, Day 2

Day 2 was do or die, since the boat was going back in the following morning. Our friends Dave and Tiffany helped us out, fortunately, and we put in a good twelve hours. Thanks largely to this weekend of work, I shed the blinding paleness and extra pounds visible in some of the earlier posts.

We temporarily misplaced the camera, and so unfortunately we have no pictures of the blister repair. I apologize to all the visual learners out there, but will do my best to explain. For each blister, one piece of woven fiberglass must be cut out to fit the hole left by sanding the blister as exactly as possible. Another piece must be cut out that is a couple inches larger, applied on top of the first. This functions to both fill the holes, and make a sturdy repair by connecting to outer areas of fiberglass. Professionals may do more than two cuts of fiberglass, but I emphasize that we're amateurs. We assigned a number to each blister with a sharpie, and then set each pair of cuts down on a large piece of paper with corresponding numbers.

A liter of fiberglassing resin is mixed with a cap full of hardener. This has to be stirred extremely vigorously in the heat, lest it harden and become useless. Both sides of the smaller cut are rolled over with as much resin as it can hold, then applied to the blister and generously rolled over again. The same goes for the second. This is a bit unnerving because of how fast the resin sets up, but it proved to be fairly easy with five people. We had one stirring, one rolling the cuts on the ground, one rolling the cuts onto the boat, one spotting and one handing the next pieces. We probably got all 40 done in under ten minutes (prep-work aside).

The temperature very much affects how quickly the fiberglass will set up. Because it was easily 95 degrees while we were doing this, it took all of ten minutes -- probably less. I wouldn't recommend this for someone who hasn't glassed before (like us), but again we had five people and these were relatively small pieces of fiberglass so it worked out. Later, when we did the entire bow deck, we waited until dusk (post on this in the near future).

After everything has dried, it needs to be sanded. How tedious you want this to be is really up to you. Professional jobs usually use several grades of sandpaper, whereas we used one. Alternately, professionals will sometimes put some layers of fiberglass down, sand it, put more layers down, sand it finer, and so on and so forth. We didn't have the time or the patience, so we used one grade, and just sanded the patches to be flush with the rest of the hull.

Finally, we were ready to paint.

Lauren and Oly painting

We wiped all the remaining dust / dirt off with acetone, and taped around the (blue) water line. The first coat was a primer that we let dry for about an hour. Ideally, we would've put on two or even three coats of this primer, but just didn't have the time.

lol art degree

Oly and I rolled the larger areas, while Lauren took a paintbrush to the harder to reach areas.

Finished (sans support squares)

Dave, Oliver, Lauren and I (very flattering)

John The Riot stopped by to admire

Starboard

Bow

Stern

Obligatory before-after

All in all it turned out to be a fairly successful weekend. We didn't get the squares where the supports rested finished, nor did we give the blisters the attention we should've. Additionally, more coats of primer and paint would've been preferable, and Oly found two or three more blisters the next morning that we hadn't seen. Still, we ultimately got everything done that we wanted to, and got Soup back in the water with her hull in much better condition.