Fun With Fiberglass

Fiberglass can be fun. I want to connect both sides of the hull and reinforce below the mast step. I started by filling in the area of where the outer stem as with polyester and fiberglass strips. Polyester resin is good here because it is a non-structural area, and it is less expensive than epoxy. Once the outer stem area was filled I wanted to bridge the gap between each half of the hull, distributing the forces of the mast step over a large area. My first attempt to do this was not very successful. First it was to cold out and the epoxy was to cold. The colder it is the more difficult it is for the resin to soak into the glass. I did not wet out the glass enough, and after it cured it did not stick. I was able to remove a majority of the bad glass, it did not stick like it should, but it was still really stubborn. Death of a thousand cuts, access to the area is very tight and the only thing I had to use was a Dremel and chisel.

The picture above shows the cleaned up result. I left the dry glass that was directly under the mast step. This layer is in addition to the polyester filling below. The next layer will bond to this layer and to each side of the hull.

One positiv

e that came from this was my discovery of the innermost layer of original fiberglass and it's lack of resin. The layer closest to the wo

od would have been resin starved as the wood absorbed the resin before it cured.

You can see an area peeling up.

I removed all of this layer on both port and starboard, prepared for more glass and put down another 2 layers of biaxial structural fiberglass and a layer of fiberglass mat.

I then cleaned up this layer and put in a more extensive round of glass spanning the stem and criss crossing under the mast step.

This is where I am now. I am in the process of preparing this layer for additional fiberglass and plywood.