This weekend we finished glassing the inner surface of the latest hull half. It turned out spectacular, as you can see in this photo. Notice how shimmery it is. Dawna did all of the work of applying the glass while I assisted by mixing batches of epoxy and squeegee-ing off the excess from the previous sections of glass. Dawna is really good at this, so I was more than happy to stand back and watch the master at work. The surface is completely uniform, with basically no excess epoxy. And the very fair foam planks help too. All glass strands are properly aligned, with no glass spaghetti, and the edges blend together cleanly at the overlaps.
You will note the satiny stiffening stringer structure (say that 10 times fast) in the middle of the forward nine feet of hull. It is particularly tedious to get the multiple layers of glass to lay tight and fully bonded with no voids. Dawna and I worked together for a good hour going back and forth on the stringer repeatedly pressing the layers back down until it all kicked and solidified. The first time I did this on the previous hull it came out pretty good. This time, with Dawna applying her magic touch, the result was much cleaner and I have not found any voids or bubbles.
So guess who gets to do all of the glass work in the future?
Here's a bug eye view, okay maybe a mouse eye view, of the glassed surface with the stringer running down the right hand side. Notice how the glass warps (bundles of glass strands) line up uniformly. Maybe it is just me, but I find this very exhilarating.
So now we will get ready to install bulkheads next weekend. I bet Dawna will be a natural at that too!
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