It's been a long time....

Well the holidays are over, and real boat building has commenced once again.  Between Thanksgiving and Christmas any work that was performed consisted of sanding, and then there was some sanding, and some sanding, and even a little bit of sanding.

Not very diligent with the use of the camera - but here is one shot of the hull after sanding:

Did manage to get the dagger board truck assembled:

Finally after announcing our plans in November - we finally bit the bullet and prepared to put the fiberglass on.  I did quite a bit of research on this prior to the actual event and we were torn on how to proceed.  CLC Boats recommends laying the fiber glass on bare (no epoxy layers) wood, while several other techniques recommend laying the fiber glass over fairly fresh epoxy. The idea is that you want to have the glass completely wetted out - which makes the glass completely transparent.  By having  bare wood the theory goes that the wood might absorb some epoxy during the curing process - leaving dry areas.  The other problem that may occur is that wood will "off gas" put air bubbles into the layup.

Since CLC recommended this technique - and the vast majority of other blogs we have looked at all proceeded with this method - we did that same thing - glass onto bare wood.  We did deviate from the instructions in that we applied the glass to both the bottom panel as well as the first strake (limited success on this with more to follow in the next update.

So here are the pics:

Taped up and ready to go:

Temperature on the boat, with heat lamps and furnace blasting was perfect (the higher the temperature the better.  To eliminate the "off gas" problem, by having the hull nice and warm, as it cools down it will actually "in gas" if that that is a term):

We smoothed out the glass:

We used a technique of both squeegeing and rolling the epoxy.  Here it all wetted out:

After a couple of hours we trimmed off the excess glass:

After curing - another coat of epoxy over the entire hull to fill the weave of the glass.  Looked awesome when done.

Forgot to bring the camera with us this week - but we did get a lot done.  It of course started with sanding - pics and more to follow in the next update.