Anyone who has been following my (slow) restoration of this rather sad Chris Craft Corvette will have seen the amount of work and different materials that I have used to bring the hull back into one lump.
The original 48" long hull was planked with balsa wood (original Sterling Kit assembly) but was rotten and fuel soaked in places and needed a fair bit of attention to replace these areas and to replace the badly repaired patches and remove the coating of filler paste that was roughly applied over everything including the balsa wood, rotten and fuel soaked woods, filled patches, planked hardwood, black mould and various layers of paint!
Surprisingly, the filler paste needed to be chipped off of some areas with a chisel, whilst in other places it was happy to almost peel-off in large lumps, but the areas to which it adhered the best included all of the pre-mentioned - so there was no real logic to how or why the filler stuck to some areas and not others.
Since then some areas of the hull have been re-planked with hardwood that I stripped on my bandsaw, and the lower bows have been re-made and carved from solid balsa wood laminations, but this still leaves some areas of the original planked balsa wood.
Recently, I have been thinking that I would be happier if I could coat all of the hull exterior with a lightweight glass fibre cloth that could be laminated onto the hull to give a uniform outer-surface and to toughen-up the balsa wood areas. The finished "shell" would also help to protect the hull against any of the knocks that r/c boats can suffer when sailed every week, year-in and year-out.
Having never coated any hull previously, I have some concerns about what the glass fibre would and would not adhere to permanently as I have so many different materials that I would like to cover, and at the moment, none of these surfaces are "bare" as they have all been painted to make it easier to see where areas needed to be sanded and blended-in to give an acceptable surface.
Rubbing the paint down is not a problem but it will reveal a variety of materials that I would like to cover.
Does anyone have any experience of coating an old hull with any form of cloth and resin over a variety of surfaces? Any recommendations about what cloth and/or resins to use along with a proven application method would be greatly appreciated as this is a large hull and I would like to find out as much as I can about it before spending a lot of time on it.
........maybe it would be better not to bother and just see how things go and make any small repairs as and when they happen...........?