It's been a little while since I posted. I'll try to catch up my posts in the next few days.

The fiberglassing of the entire inside is done with 10oz cloth. The combination of fir marine plywood and 10oz cloth really sucks up the epoxy. I think it took about 20-24oz PER 38" wide strip (and this is run across the bottom - about 74" long for each strip) This all went pretty well, but since there is so much epoxy going on, it took me a lot longer than I thought it would. First a heavy coat of epoxy is rolled onto the mostly bare plywood. Then the (precut and pre-rolled onto sticks) fiberglass is rolled out onto the wet epoxy. I found out that one must carefully roll the fiberglass onto the wet epoxy, repositioning the fiberglass after it is rolled out is quite messy and difficult. Next a coat of epoxy is rolled into the glass. Each ‘strip’ of fiberglass is lapped an inch or so onto the previous one to give continuous strength and coverage. Now that the weather is warmer and its about 72 in my garage, I had to pause a couple of times to roll out the bubbles before previous strips set up too much. All together it took about 2-3 hours to do the entire inside of the bottom. I think it took 7 “strips” of fiberglass. The last one up at the bow was shorter but also took longer to put in because it has to be sliced in a couple of places to allow it to lie into the deep contours there. I ended up allowing it to lap over itself heavily. That’s ok though, I certainly don’t mind the extra layers up there. It’ll just give it that much more strength.

So now the inside of the bottom has 2 layers of 10oz tape on the chines and on the center (Fairbody) with a layer of 10oz across the whole thing. I found that if I come back before the epoxy is totally hard – say 4-8 hrs later, I could use a utility knife to cut off the excess fiberglass where it hung over the edges. This was much easier than trying to sand or scrape it off. Then I just had a little ‘edge’ of fiberglass/epoxy to sand which went about as fast as I could move the sander. Then I lightly sanded the entire inside to take off any little ‘bumps’. The final thing I did was to thoroughly sand the long areas of the inside where the stringers would be glued. This will ensure good adhesion when it comes time to drop the bottom onto the stringers and I won’t have to hold my heavy sander upside down and sand over my head!

Flipping the bottom which I thought should weight about 180-200lbs turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. Totally by accident, I had 3 guys helping me and I'm glad I did because it was still a handful. After turning, I found that I had very little squeeze-through at the fairbody and chine joints. What I did have was easily dispatched with my disk sander. At this point it was a straightforward job to fill the fairbody and chine joints with a mix of thickened epoxy (Fibers for joint strength and Cabosil for toughness). I then applied the 3 layers of 10oz tape at the fairbody and 2 at the chine joint.

I decided to hoist the bottom up to the ceiling to facilitate test fitting later by myself (I’m usually working alone) and to get it out of the way as much as possible. A couple of double pulleys and some 1/4” nylon and it was done. I swear it weighs more than the 200ish lbs I had guessed it would weigh. I need to recheck my calculations. Perhaps it is that the fir plywood absorbs more epoxy than hardwood plywood? (I do seem to be using a lot – 3-4 gallons so far)