August 18, 2002 - Glass Fibre and Gazebos.

For a while I couldn't work on the boat because it was raining and the gazebo wasn't big enough to cover the whole of the hull. This was rather annoying; I had to leave the boat lying in the garden under some tarpaulin. There were two problems - the wood wasn't varnished, so if it got wet it would rot or swell, and secondly when gluing with epoxy you don't want the glue to get wet or it won't dry properly and be strong enough. But then I came up with a solution using the tarpaulin to extend the gazebo, and storing the boat on two tables we have.

The next thing to do was seal the outsides of the stitch and glue seams with fibreglass and epoxy. The inside of the seams had had two weeks to really dry well and harden, and so I clipped off the bits of wire extending out of the outside of the hull. That was something I probably should have mentioned in the previous entry - you run the wire from the outside through one hole, and out the other, then twisting the wire together to tighten the join. As a result on the inside all you see is a small loop of wire whereas on the outside there are big twisted bits sticking out. These need to be cut off before fibreglassing can begin.

As usual I first had to wet the seams before I could fix on fibreglass. The idea of these seams is not so much to strengthen the hull as to ensure it is entirely watertight. Fitting the fibre involved pressing it against the wetted wood and then brushing on more epoxy. It wasn't as tricky as I thought it would be - the fibreglass tape was well-behaved and went where I wanted it to. I'd had nightmares about it going all over the place and getting tangled and sticky but that didn't happen.

There was one problem with the tape not folding over the seam properly at the ends - it kept popping back up again. But with three coats of epoxy it eventually settled down.

The job was done quicker than I expected, so I also fitted the runners to the bottom of the boat. These are a central large long piece of douglas fir and a thinner piece on either side, and ensure that you don't scrape the bottom of the boat when moving it about on land or porting it - for example between the lower and upper river Cam using the rollers by the mill in Cambridge.

The runners were each about 3.5m long, and were supposed to curve over the bottom of the punt, but the final ends were really hard to glue down. After covering both the runner and the bottom of the hull with glue I had to pile lots of bricks to bend the wood, and then I put brass screws through from the bottom to hold the runner in place. Even so, you can see that the very ends aren't touching the hull. I'll be sawing them off obliquely to ensure the runners don't snag.