Tuesday, January 02, 2007

One Messy Day

Today was a day of important progress. We started off by filling and sanding the exterior of both hulls in preparation for fiberglassing. This put a plethora of dust in the air. Once this settled down we moved the hulls to an out of the way spot and then cleaned up all of the wood shavings, dust, and old drop cloths from Sunday.

Next up was prep for glassing the exterior of the hulls which consisted of putting down new drop cloths and vacuuming the hulls to get rid of any remaining dust. We laid out the fiberglass cloth on hull #1 and then began the marathon of stickiness; everything we touched for the next couple of hours remained attached. We were able to put the first coat of epoxy down, with glass, on both hulls in about an hour; then we decided to go back and finish the first coat of epoxy on the bare wood.







Here is a detailed result of our efforts to make these boat the best they can be; Alan really likes this picture. This is the bottom end of the Red Oak stem cap on hull #1 after being glassed.








After the fist coats were done Matt had to leave, so Alan and I decided to tackle the first shaping of an ama. It is an intimidating task to take a long block of foam and turn it into a round, smooth ama. We had decent results with a serrated knife and sand paper. As you can see there were a lot of small foam bits,, the smallest of which stuck to us. Tomorrow's main focus will be on the amas. In addition to shaping the ama we put a second coat of epoxy on the exterior of each hull so that they can be sanded smooth tomorrow.