Re: Glassing Deck...

Posted by DaveW on Sep 21, 2004

You'll want to round the edges of the deck so that the fiberglass will lay over it smoothly.

To keep drips off of the hull and to give yourself a nice, clean edge, run masking tape the length of the hull at the distance down from the sheerline where you want to end the fiberglass overlap. You can add a paper or plastic "skirt" below the tape to make 100% sure that no drips run down on to the hull. I prefer to use something called pre-taped drop cloth. It is light weight plastic with masking tape on one edge. It comes in several widths, and is available at Lowe's, Home Depot, and probably a lot of other places. It does a great job and is very easy to use.

To get a neat, clean edge on the fiberglass, run the fiberglass over the edge of the masking tape. Let the epoxy harden just past the tacky stage. Use a razor blade to cut along the edge of the masking tape. Peel the tape off. The excess fiberglass and epoxy will come off with the tape. You may want to keep the razor blade close by when you are peeling the tape off just in case you didn't sever all of the fiberglass strands.

To save yourself a little bit of time when blending the edge of the fiberglass overlap into the hull, you can use a small carbide scraper to smooth the edge. Hold the scraper so that the edge is perpendicular to the bottom of the seam. |scraper

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seam---|------------------- Tilt the scraper slightly so that you are just using a small amount of the blade to smooth the edge. If you see the tips of the fiberglass strands pulling a little bit out of the epoxy, you are scraping too soon. The scraper should not pull any of the glass fibers loose.

I glass my hatch covers.

In Response to: Glassing Deck... by Jim on Sep 21, 2004

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