Picking up from my last instalment, I needed to plank the transom, so I did that. Pretty straightforward after some of the other planking.
With the planking complete, I embarked on a fairly tedious sanding (and still more filling!) to get the planking in a fit state for the glass and epoxy covering. Obviously I needed to remove any glue stains, filler overspill and any other blemish that would show through the coating. To save me some of the tedium, I roughly marked the waterline with a few pieces of tape. The area below the waterline is to be painted so all I needed for that area was a smooth finish; blemishes didn’t matter.
Next step was to stain the mahogany planking with the supplied stain. This helps to give the planking a more even appearance as it moderates any differences in shade between individual planks. If I hadn’t used it before (on my Chris Craft Runabout of a few years ago), I might have been a bit alarmed by its appearance as it was applied!
But it will all look lovely once the finish is applied. Now the glassing. I was going to do this outside, but it was a pretty windy day when I was going to do it, so I stayed in the workshop and managed to work around the hull by shifting it around a bit as I went. First, I should say that I do not follow all the perfectly good advice you can find on this subject, partly because a lot of it is contradictory. So here is how I do it. First, I cut a piece of cloth (
100 gsm twill from Easy Composites) and drape it over the hull. I smooth it out with my hands to get it to lie as flat as I can. The weave will distort a bit to help the cloth conform to the hull shape.
Most of the advice will tell you not to try and apply the cloth over a sharp corner like the chine but to apply the cloth in separate pieces. They say the cloth will not fold that tightly. They are right – sort of. My view is that the chine is actually where I want the glass to strengthen that corner, so I do it that way. There are certainly places where the cloth doesn’t follow the hull perfectly, but mostly it does, with a little encouragement, so I am happy. I apply the epoxy with a roller, making sure the cloth is pressed hard against the hull and that there is only sufficient resin to wet out the cloth. I am not trying to fill the weave at this stage.
And here is the hull with the cloth all rolled down.
Some of the advice will suggest you should use an old credit card to scrape off excess resin. Using a roller means there really isn’t excess and it dries with the weave of the cloth still readily apparent.
Once dry, the excess cloth is trimmed off with a Stanley knife.
The issue I had with this particular hull is that for the aft portion there is no clear delineation between hull side and deck. I had decided to simply let the cloth hang and see where the epoxy got to as I rolled it on with hull upside down. One side looked quite neat but the other was like this –
I already knew that there would be some overlap of the glass edges as I glassed the deck, so I decided to simply overlap all the way over this ragged edge then rub down the resultant bump. I did rub down the edges of the cloth to a feather edge before adding the deck cloth –
And this is the overlapped area –
Once the deck epoxy was cured it was on to some fairly aggressive rubbing down to lose the edges of the cloth.
Once these were smooth, I applied a coat of epoxy to fill the weave. At least I tried to. Largely because of the difficulty in differentiating between hull and deck, I decided to apply this fill coat to the whole hull and deck in one go. I pushed some large plastic containers into the cockpits so I could stand the hull upside down and clear of the bench, planning to do the deck first then turn the hull over and do the rest. I mixed up the epoxy and set to. The decks and the hull sides went fine but a short while after I started on the bottom it became clear the epoxy was starting to go off. I had mixed it in a shallow tray (well, a takeaway food container actually) but it was a hot day and the workshop was pretty warm. Foolishly I kept going, hoping to get a coat on the whole hull before the epoxy defeated me. The result was a bottom coat that never flowed out and cured with loads of hollows and craters. I should have known better. Actually I did know better and was telling myself the whole time I was doing it that this was a silly move. Hey-ho, another lesson re-re-re-learnt!
I set to with rubbing down the lumpy bottom.
After a while, I decided that sanding off the entire coat was not really needed. Once I had the worst of the high spots done, I mixed up a fairing mixture of epoxy (epoxy plus colloidal silica and wood flour) and squeegeed that over the bottom, filling the remaining craters and leaving a relatively smooth surface that need only modest rubbing down to be ready for painting.
Once that little boo-boo had been dealt with and I had finished telling myself never to do that again, a final rub down all over and the hull was ready for varnish. (You might have gathered that I have now had my fill of wet and dry paper for a while.
) Here is the first coat of many.
So a couple of weeks now of varnishing to build up a good coverage ready for polishing out. I hope we don’t suddenly find the weather turning cold – I like it as it is for the varnishing. Incidentally, the Dumas instructions suggest painting the king plank and deck margin planks black as was often seen on full size Chris Crafts. I did this with my C-C Runabout but couldn’t decide if I really liked it, and am still not sure. So I have left this with no black planks and it’s too late now to change my mind.
Happy building and sailing folks
Greg
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Topic: Chris Craft Triple Cockpit, Dumas kit (Read 8805 times)