Re: Help needed

Posted by seth on Sep 3, 2007

one of the real lessons i learned while building my chesapeake 16lt was that i had to just trust myself on a lot of things.

the carbosil in the sheer joints is to keep the epoxy from running out of the joint when you clamp it. do your joints seem to be holding? if so, then my guess would be that you're just fine. there will be fiberglass and more layers of epoxy over that joint, so it should have plenty of support.

the whole process does feel like one big risk-- so many ways to mess up!-- but just keep moving forward. i'd say that there are very few mistakes that you can't correct, and i think that, for the most part, someone who is being careful will have an easy time avoiding most of the mistakes anyway.

i ran into trouble doing the end pours; my tape damns kept breaking and i'd have thickened epoky pouring down into the boat, which was alarming. after three (3) tries, i finally taped a cardboard damn in place, then coated the inside of it with very thick epoxy and let that dry, which formed a real, leakproof, solid dam to keep the endpour where it was supposed to be.

re: your leak and your tape choices, i'd guess that whatever leaked on to your panels can be sanded off when you start preparing your boat to finish, so i wouldn't worry too much about that. also, if what you're seeing is just a result of unthickened epoxy, it should disappear under the several layers of epoxy you'll put on the boat anyway. i used 3m packing tape for masking, and it worked very well. i also used it to hold my onlays in place after having some mishaps with electrical tape, which i would not recommend.

oh, and the other thing that threw me was that, in my kit, the glass cloth for the cockpit and the cloth for the deck were not in two separate pieces. yours may be, but i figured i had lost the cockpit piece and used cloth that did not come with the kit, then realized i should have cut it from the piece i thought was for the deck.

at every step i was convinced i was about to do something so wrong i'd destroy the boat, and at the end i had a beautiful, sturdy, fast boat that really impresses everyone who sees it. there are flaws, but i'm certainly the only person who can see them (well, i'm sure the other members of this forum could, heh), and my goal was to build a great, amazing boat-- not a perfect one.

In Response to: Help needed by Rich on Sep 3, 2007

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