woensdag 31 oktober 2007

lamination almost complete

Last few days I've laminated the gunwale area and the cabin side, planked the deck and laminated the deck. I glued the deck-foam with putty instead of PU-glue and this worked much better (see earlier post about glueing the deck of the first hull half).
Although I worked really hard to get it right, there were still some bad spots and bubbles in the laminate. I know, it's not a big deal to patch them but it was still very frustrating. I thougth I should by now be able to make a flawless laminate. I suspect using the peelply might be part of the problem, as I was sure the laminate was perfect before I put it on. Maybe the laminate has shifted/lifted while I was putting the peel ply on. For the future (outer skin) I'm going to try to laminate the large areas without peelply.

Picture of the aft beam bulkhead, held in place with a jig (see the posts about building the first hull half).
Now I'll only have to fix the front beam bulkhead and make and fit the bow web before I can join the two halves. Looking forward to that.....

2 opmerkingen:

biol zei

Hi Menno,
bubble surprise is a very frustrating experience. I'm sorry.

From my experience in previous projects (but those were S&G plywood) bubbles may be caused by outgassing: air present inside the core reach the surface under the glass and form a bubble. This is frequent with wood and depends mainly on temperature: raising temperature = outgassing.

To avoid this (and epoxy "starvation" on wet glass, too), someone also suggests to saturate the wood core surface with a first epoxy application and let it cure, but I'm not sure this apply to foam core, too. Time to re-read Ian construciotn booklet ...

Menno zei

Hi Biol,

Thanks for the advice. Outgassing may be part of the problem, although I thought I had the workshop heated quite some time in advance and kept the temperature stable...
Epoxy coating the whole surface and sanding it before laminating may be an option, although I'd rather nog go into it as it is a lot of extra work.

When I start glassing the outside I'll do some small areas first to find out what works best.