Bateau Corsair 13 - March 12

We removed the plastic ties and completed the fillets. While waiting for the fillets to harden, we prepared the glass for the seams. For the seams the glass specified is 12oz 45/45 bias biaxial which is not to be found in the Philippines. Actually the only "structural" fiberglass available is 6oz plain woven cloth. So, after consultation with the designer, I set out to use 3 layers of the woven cloth where 1 layer of biax is specified and 5 layers where 2 layers of biax as specified. To make matters worse, the cloth is not sold in tape form. Dreading to import, I bought a roll and rigged up the setup below to cut the cloth into strips (sorry about the picture, all my pictures are taken with my Nokia 7650 cellphone).

Basically, we hung the roll on a pipe between two 4x2 studs that also hold up the fold out walls of my workshop. A piece of 3/8 plywood was also hung to serve as a cutting table. Using a piece of aluminum channel we cut the glass at a 45 degree angle to simulate the 45/45 degree bias. I was surprise when my wife said I was making a "45 degree bias". "How do you know that?!", I asked. It was a topic in their dressmaking class.

The setup made cutting the simulated biax easy work. And the cuts were really clean.

I should add a piece of window glass on top of the plywood along the cutting line so that the plywood does not get cut by the utility knife.

After about cutting 40 something strips, the fillets seemed hard enough so we flipped the hull over and sanded down the seams so they all had a nice round shape.

The first thing we glassed was the keel.

Notice in the picture above my experimenting with "poorman's peel". Results were not too good as the epoxy was still uneven. Need to work on my technique here.

It was maybe about 3PM by this time and the heat was terrible. My guesswork was it was around 38 deg C. I'd read and discussed on some forums the problems of working epoxy at such temperatures and it had always worried me. Well after glassing 3 layers onto the keel, my fears started to come true with the epoxy starting to be very hard to work! It was either we stop or try the icebath idea.

The icebath idea is simply to cool the epoxy using an icebath. Well it worked! Here you can see the KFC bucket of ice:

Initially, I had discussed cooling the components but this would make mixing difficult. Achieving a good mix, as I understand it, is essential to good epoxy. So what we did was first to mix the adhesive and hardener at room temp and then to immerse the mixing pot in the ice bath as the mixture started to heat up from its components reacting. The quick removal of heat would insure we'd at least have the rated working time or even more. Like I said it worked and we happily layed down the keel and chine seams.

The cool temperature of the evening encouraged us on and we were able to finish transom seams as well.