April 10, the first thing I did this morning was to take a brush to the hull to remove the majority of the dust. Then I draped a sheet of glass cloth over the bottom and cut it to size. Then I carefully rolled it up and set it aside for later. I removed all the bottom planks. At this point I took a couple of strips of plastic drop cloth and covered the two center battens. This is to prevent any epoxy sticking the boat to the mold. Once this is done, mix up some epoxy and go about the job of re-fasting each floor plank down with epoxy.
In Harry’s article he mentions three different ways to build the floor. Well here is a fourth! By cutting a 25% bevel to one side of each plank it gives a place for the wood-flour epoxy mix to be trowled into. Once all voids are filled with epoxy wood-flour, we then roll our fiber glass cloth on to the bottom. At this point you smooth out the cloth to the freshly trowled surface. Once fit, then start mixing epoxy and spread it evenly saturating every square inch of the glass cloth, I use one of those yellow plastic spreaders and go about dumping epoxy in the middle and start spreading it evenly over all the glass cloth. At this point we wait for everything to dry.
In the next post we will go about applying faring compound and getting the hull ready for the skeg, paint and varnish.