Hi Guys
I am now ready to fibre glass the hull of my schooner with Ripmax SP Epoxy, I have decided to do it in two halves using a fine glass cloth, well it did sound easy, but as with everything there is a technique and I did not know it or maybe I thought I did, anyway here is how it went.
first I made a jig to hold the boat upside down by using the mast hole positions as a location, then having sanded the hull to a reasonable finish, remembering the single planked hull is constructed with 1/16"thick x 3/8 wide planks, I painted the first half of the hull in a mixture of 3 resin and 1 hardener and laid the cloth straight onto the wet resin my first act was to brush more resin on as I smoothed out the cloth, this seemed to work initially but then as I looked back from the middle section to see the first area had started to bubble, now panic takes over as I try to lay the rest of the cloth without adding more resin this worked and the cloth stayed flat, now I had to go back and try to remove the bubbles I could flatten them by stabbing with a dry brush but they returned in minutes I tried rolling them flat with a small roller this increased the problem, the epoxy has a 24 hour drying time so I spent the evening stabbing the bubbles whilst it cured, going to bed thinking I had ruined the boat. Next morning showed half of the side full of small bubbles the last half of the side smooth. After smoothing the edges of the cured resin I turned the boat round and painted the other side of the hull and dry brushed the cloth on it worked now wait for the resin to cure before adding more