Glassing the Hull

 After a moderate amount of fairing, I'm ready to glass the hull of the boat.  For the most part, I really only needed to smooth out the areas where the boat was sitting on the cradle supports.  The seams where plywood panels were scarfed together only needed a touch of fairing material.  With practice using angled scarf joints, I do think that it would be possible to build a boat with a natural wood finish (no fairing compound). 


After fairing the bottom, I laid out the fiberglass cloth and smoothed it out to get rid of any wrinkles.  The next step was to get quite a few cups of epoxy ready to go.  I think that the easiest way to do this is to pump out a whole bunch of cups of Epoxy resin.  Resin is much more viscous than the hardener and takes longer to pump, so it is best to either have a helper to prepare the resin for you or to pump out a bunch ahead of time.  I did several myself before I started and my wife was very helpful also doing the bulk of the resin prep.


I ended up using about 25 or so twelve shot (from the West system pumps) cups of epoxy mix to glass the entire hull.  

I started at the front of the bottom of the hull, and poured on the epoxy mix and then dragged the mix outwards.  It takes quite a bit of time to get complete coverage, especially in areas where there is overlapping glass cloth.  


I worked in about five foot sections from the font back.  Each time I finished a section, I covered that section with nylon release cloth.  I've found that using release cloth makes a big difference in the quality of the surface.  The photo to the left show the boat completely done with the release cloth thoroughly wetted out.