Petrel Play SG Build - Mastering Fiberglass Application Inside a Kayak - E12

Hey, welcome back to The Guillemot Kayaks Workshop. I'm Nick Schade. This is Bill, and we are working on the Petrel Play SG kayak kit from Chesapeake Light Craft. Chesapeake Light Craft provided us with this kit, and it's my design. If you're interested in building this boat yourself, you can get the kit from Chesapeake Light Craft.

I should be able to put a link up someplace or in the description. And if you want to build it from scratch, I've got the plans at my website. So in the last episode, we did the fillets on these seams. That was, I believe, day four of the project. We, I think, are on day five of the project now, and this will probably be episode - I'm not even sure what episode it might be - episode 11 when it's all done.

So we're getting several episodes per day of work here. What we are going to be doing today - I often will lay the fillets down and then lay the glass directly on top of them while the fillets are still wet. We opted to let the fillets harden, and we will lay the glass down on the hard fillets, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do it.

The downside is there's some ridges and stuff from the epoxy that we want to get rid of, and we want to scuff up the surface of the fillets to get a better mechanical bond - the epoxy that's on here. So by doing it in separate operations, we add an operation - that's sanding in between. Not a big deal and a really reasonable way for you to do it at home, especially if you've got a limited time window in order to work on the boat.

What we're going to be looking at is just getting some sandpaper and - I have this sander which can be hooked up to dust collection - we'll see. Since we're recording video, I may or may not actually hook it up to the dust collection. But this will be getting in there and just getting rid of any of the dust picks. And I'll get some more sanding blocks here. This isn't rocket science - what we're doing here. We're just, you know, run your hand over the surface, feel for rough spots and sand them off, and give the whole thing a little bit... 
Yeah, yeah. So we'll want to - when this is sanded appropriately - the fillet will have sort of a dusty grayish light brown look to it. We won't be eliminating the texture, so there might be some spots where we're not sanding down until the texture is all gone right and the thing to remember here - this isn't finished sanding. We're not trying for cosmetic beauty here. It's not seen. We're not going to see it, you know. We're going to be using 80 grit - something coarse. We're not trying to make it pretty, and we're not trying to make it perfect. We're just trying to get rid of the ridges, give a little bit of tooth to the surface right and move on.

So we don't want to make this an all day project - quick it up and move on. Yep. There's that sanding block right there, and we'll think about hooking that up to the vacuum. Just a word about safety - my feeling is one of the most dangerous things in the shop is the dust we get from sanding, in particular epoxy. When it's cured, it's pretty inert.

So this just to give people an idea of the time schedule - we are recording this right now. It is January 15th. The last time Bill was here was before Christmas. So we did these fillets almost a month ago. Yeah, so this epoxy fully cured. Now, if we were sanding it 24 hours later, it wouldn't, you know, it would be cured sufficiently that we want to sand it but still chemically not in there, and epoxy can cause an allergic reaction in some people. So, breathing in uncured epoxy dust, you know, you can use the sort of comfort masks and everything we're used to from dealing with COVID, but a real respirator—oh, you got a couple right here—these are organic vapor cartridges. So when we're working on wet epoxy, applying wet epoxy, we'll talk a little bit about this later in the day. So this you just need to get the particulate, yeah, so with these 3M filters, so this would go overhead just around the back and we want so all the air is coming in through the filters.

So test if you have a good seal is a block the these holes. If you can't breathe it's a good seal that means all the air is coming through these filters. I don't think it's quite as necessary today since everything is cured but best practices would be to wear a respirator when you're sanding the audio from this is one reason I probably won't wear a respirator today. Yeah, I'm sounding like Charlie Brown's teach it right now so I would just wear one of those, yeah, masks, yeah, the you know it's not going to be crazy Dusty in here best practice you know these are a lot more effective sure than the typical you know k95 or whatever we've been using for Co and so forth you know their their seal isn't great where this you know the fact that I can make it so I can't breathe by blocking off those pretty much much says all the air is coming through the filter so best practice is do as they say not as they do and wear a respirator but for the purposes of this video and actually communicating we won't be wearing the respirator that much all right so let's just get to sanding then.

So um I know we sanded most of the combing here and broke the edge on it but if we're in the process if we feel edges on the wood do we knock that down as well? Yeah, essentially if you feel an edge the glass doesn't want to go over sharp corners of any kind okay so regardless of whether it's wood edges CA glue edges epoxy edges we want to knock those down so like out here we just where the edge of our filling tool was we had a little squeeze out here that we neglected to pull off so if we just take our sander and you get that surface there and you can feel that with your finger. It's quickly knock it's it's done it doesn't need to be perfect and then you see we're starting to get a light color on that fillet itself so so you see some scratches in the fillet and it feels nice you know it doesn't need to be smooth as a baby's bottom but we we want it just get rid of the high spot okay I'm just going to smooth this down a little I think yeah yeah that's fine this there was a place here where the end of this panel was broken off so we put a little bit of fill up material just to fill that up this side the piece of wood went the whole way so we didn't need to do the same but just any little high spot that feels rough are.

Okay, so we've done a brief sanding here, and again, for safety protocol, we've got all this dust. An obvious way for some people to get rid of all this dust if you have an air compressor: just blow it all out. The problem with that is you haven't gotten rid of the dust; you've just put it up in the air and moved it on to all your tools. I much prefer getting a vacuum and vacuuming up all the dust.

Okay, so we took a break for lunch and now we are going to glass the interior. I think we'll go about this a little bit differently than the last time. Last time I had us just pour epoxy in and spread it around with a squeegee. I think we will use these foam rollers and a roller tray and use that to spread the epoxy. And the other thing going on as if you look at this the contours of this much more complicated than the hull. We've got the combing here with a recess behind it and the glass is going to have issues getting around a hatch like that.

So we'll start in the middle, get everything sorted around the hat, the cockpit, then move one way or the other. We'll probably try the stern first because it's probably going to be a little bit easier then come and do around the hatches here. We want to get the glass to conform all the way around here, lay down smoothly. Okay, so it's going to be a little bit of a trick.

Let's think about the glass itself right now. I have some pre-cut stuff here just from a prior project. Let's just see what that looks like on here. So the 4 oz glass is what comes with all the kits. I think all the kayak kits come with 4 oz glass, some of the bigger boats that CLC has kits for are 6 oz. I think that's the heaviest they deal with, okay, in their kits.

So I've laid this, this is the factory edge, the salvaged edge. So the roll is essentially going across the boat here and then I'm trying to get it to conform to the shape here and I'm not just jamming my fingers down into this to try and get that cloth to conform. The S of ragged edge of the plywood here can snag the cloth a little bit so I'm lifting that edge up so it has room to slide down into the boat without snagging on that edge.

Alright, so we'll lay it across here and have a little bit of overlap so it's at about 4 inches. Yeah, you know it's sort of an arbitrary amount but at least an inch of overlap having a little bit of reinforcement behind the cockpit and in front of the cockpit is kind of a good thing that overlap serves that purpose of being a reinforcement. We've got a triangle here you probably can't see it in the video but there's like 8 inches left here that's still uncovered like when we did the hull I'd like to fold this back and have the overlap working towards the ends so as we're starting in the middle and move this way if we were to drag a squeegee across here it doesn't snag on the new layer of cloth.

And so again we can tuck this down trying and get it so it snugs up all the way around the contours of that so you feel how it'll conform to that shape. Yeah, it really does quite nicely this end is easier than the other end so if we're able to do a pretty good job of getting this wrinkle-free that should indicate that it's possible to get it wrinkle-free when we put the epoxy on right you know theoretically there were probably going to be wrinkles at some point but we know that it should be at least possible to get this wrinkle-free later on but having this nice unbroken fibers coming up from the deck onto the recess makes that good and strong that's reinforcing all that seam there so that makes for a really strong setup. 
Alright, now we'll do the same thing at the other end. Alright, so we don't need to have a whole lot out there, just enough to cover that. Alright, and then give it a trim a couple inches away from the edge there, sharp scissors. Yeah, it's amazing how sharp they stay while cutting glass fiber all day. And we do want to get the overlap here, so when we come this way, right, so get the folded and one under the middle one and again this double doubling up here that's a good place to have a little bit reinforcement in front of the cockpit.

Alright, that looks good. So we just have a little spot here at the end. These a little bit more glass so we can just find. I think I have a smaller piece we can cut up to do that, be able to get it out of that. And similar on the other end, we'll start the camera and start talking.

Okay, alright. So we've got the glass all laid out here, and we've got our epoxy here. I turned on the heat this morning because it was cold out, and I want the epoxy a little bit warmer. I think you noticed last time that when it was cold, it didn't flow as well. Yeah, it was a little stiff. So the pumps will hopefully work a little bit better since the shop is warm.

I also have this little heating blanket around it, okay to warm it up a little bit more. Yep, I have a light bulb. Unfortunately, this is an LED light bulb so it doesn't throw a lot of heat, but throwing a nice incandescent light bulb between the jugs can warm things up, making it easier to work with, right? That's our epoxy.

We have these rollers. CLC sells these—they're full-length rollers that I just took the band saw and cut in half to make two half-length rollers. These little roller trays still have some chip brushes. There might be places where these are easier to reach spots, and some squeegees. So again, I don't want to take. I did, was the camera running when I had this discussion with you before? I'm not sure. I don't think it was. No, yeah, as we discussed in the hall, remember I kept emphasizing we don't need to wet it out perfectly with the brush; we're going to squeegee it.

And remember the grunge cup? I do vaguely remember the grunge cup, right? So, and I talked about bridging, bridging, right? So, the thing with the bridging is that we don't have to get it perfect on the first time around because we're going to revisit it later in the process. And so, the grunge cupping, just a quick reminder, is we're taking a squeegee, there's a lot of epoxy on here, and we're going to drag it across the surface like this, and that tends to pull on the cloth a little bit, okay? So that tends to create a bridge here, down in that corner, okay?

So, one of the last things we do is mess up the surface by doing the grunge cupping. So trying to make it really perfect with the roller is taking a lot of time. What we're trying to do with the roller is get it out of the tray onto the boat. Then we'll use the squeegee to make sure there's enough everywhere, okay? We don't determine there's enough everywhere by keep on rolling until it's clear. This just gets some on there, then we squeegee it around a little bit, okay?

And if after squeegeeing and waiting a minute or two, we see there's still a gray or a white spot, then we can take a brush, dab a little bit more on. All right, that makes sense. It does, yes. It, you know, I know from doing classes where I've had this speech that people have a hard time accepting that perfection, to look perfect immediately, going to make it look perfect. And by spending too much time early on, it makes it harder to get perfection than easier.

Last time I did the pore and spread, right? This time we're going to try applying it with the roller and see if that's more comfortable for you, okay? And give people some options for different ways to do this. Glass is ready to go, epoxy. I'm going to repeat some of the basic rules of epoxy for safety. Epoxy is not the most dangerous chemical resin out there. Polyester is probably worse for you, but just because epoxy doesn't smell as bad as polyester—you know, polyester is that really smelly stuff. If you get a brand new kayak and open the hatch and stick your head in, you smell polyester resin.

Typically on most fiberglass kayaks, that smell of a brand new kayak or a brand new boat, that's polyester resin, that's solvents styrene coming out, which is a very bad solvent. So this does not smell that bad. When I'm working alone, I'll wear a respirator, so the same respirator I showed you before, this has the dust filters on it. I'll take the dust filters off and put organic vapor filter on.

And even when you're varnishing and stuff, this is probably pretty good to wear a respirator like this. You can get the simpler masks that are for organic vapors that have carbon in them, okay, or activated charcoal or something, yep, to absorb those smells. That's probably better than nothing if you don't want to spend for a good 3M with an organic vapor, that's a good way to go about it, okay? Having a large space with pretty good ventilation is also a good solution.

We're in the winter here with the closed shop and the heat going, so I'm not going to open the doors. But I do want to be able to talk for the video and talk to you. So this is again, like I said earlier with the sanding, this is a do as I say not as I do situation, okay? We'll just take that where's the wi some wear a respirator, you remember the drill with mixing epoxy, remember where you started? Yep, and all the way down and make sure it comes all the way up.

And when it says a two to one mix, what's that mean for the pumps? For the pumps are calibrated so that it gives you a two to one, right mix, one pump to one pump. Still, even though it's a 2:1 mix, start dispensing and how much epoxy do you think we need? Probably enough to wet out maybe this first cloth. Yeah, you know, I always err on the side of making a smaller batch, okay?

You may think pumping this stuff sucks, I want to do it all at one go and then never have to worry about it again. So I'm going to make enough epoxy to do the whole deck, right? Bad idea, right? What you get is a cup of epoxy, right? You get a hard hard chunk of epoxy when you're done and a really messy job on the fiberglass.

So, we'll start out with a small batch, you know, half an inch in the bottom of a yogurt container, 3/4 something like that, okay? And then if you find wow, I used that up in 30 seconds, you can next time you make it, you get a little bit of an idea, so start out small, yeah?

So, that one's staying down, this one, yeah. So, there are some threads in there for storing the epoxy that sort of engage on the pump. Oh, so sometimes by turning those threads a little bit, it won't like grab onto the pump. Okay, see there it comes back up, there you go.

Is that warmer epoxy flowing any better than...? Yeah, it comes out quite a bit easier, yeah.

Those organic masks, they do work really well 'cause I was spraying some paint in a small paint booth, and you just could not smell the stuff, yeah, yeah, they really do work nicely. Yeah, you're supposed to store them in a bag so they don't, like, lose air, you know, end up filtering the air while you're not using them, right?

So, we've got stuff in the tray, you've got a brush someplace if you should need it. I like to get all the way around the perimeter of the combing and get that stuck down so things don't shift around too much. So, I'll just start out a little bit here, okay?

So, get our roller a little wet out, and then just so I'm not trying to get this completely saturated all in the first go, just trying to get a little bit of resin onto the boat, give us a little bit of stuff to work with. And you see, I'm getting around this contour and not worrying that not everything is completely saturated. We've used up most of our epoxy, it's not completely gone, but we'll take that for now and just put this down.

And now, take our squeegee, we don't need more yet, no, no, we just want to go ahead and see the stuff we've put down. How's that going to do, is that going to get it fully wet out all the way around? Much of this is looking fine. I didn't, with the roller, I didn't pay any attention to how wet it was, was really, you know, I made sure it was getting epoxy off the roller onto the boat, but I wasn't so of gauging, okay, is it completely wet out? I don't really care about that.

Now, let's see, you have a brush over there, yep. So now there's some spots here where it's a little bit dry. I'm not putting a lot of epoxy on there, just I see it's a little bit dry there, I'm going to take my brush, and again, I'm not trying to make it completely wet here, I'm just trying to make it so there's more epoxy there. Now we take the squeegee again and see how that spreads out.

One thing you have done though is you've isolated a particular area of the kayak to work on, yep, so you won't be revisiting that on your next lap around as much, right? Yeah, yeah, so now we've kind of used up that batch of epoxy but not completely, you know, so there's a little bit left in there, don't know how well it shows on the video. Be careful where you put the brush down so you're able to pick it up again.

And just going to now let's see if we can get some epoxy on the side here, okay? And again, I'm not gauging if it's completely wet out right now, I'm just, you know, does it look like I've got some epoxy on that area? So, if you look over here, you see the cloth is wet, it's not completely stuck down to the boat, but now I'll take the squeegee and slide that around a little bit. That area looks perfect.

So now we have this place that's essentially bridging right there, yep, and we probably want a little bit more epoxy but let's see what we get with what we've got. So with the bridging again, if I just jam this in there, it's may end up snagging on the edge and not going all the way in, so I'm going to lift that edge and make it so the cloth isn't interfering with getting all the way down into that groove. And it takes a minute for it to wet out too, oh yeah, right, so that's why I don't like concern myself too much that it doesn't look wet out right after I've touched it with a brush because it'll take a second to run in there.

And so, by squeegeeing it around and getting it more spread out and then looking at it a minute later, okay, here there's still a spot. I'm not putting anything new on this brush now, that spot's gone, yep, and everything's laid down nicely without a lot of fuss and not a lot of excess, yep, right, so we don't want to put the grunge cup is to take the excess off, we'd rather not have to take off a lot of excess because that gets thrown away and this stuff is 150 bucks a gallon, yeah, it's not cheap, so a cup is this real money, all right.

So now we can just mix up a little bit more, okay, and continue on. So, I had somebody comment about mixing new epoxy and an old bucket with old epoxy in there and he said in his job he'd be fired for that, I get it, but we're not building the space shuttle, you know, we're building a boat here, it's perfectly good stuff if it's still liquid, it's usable. It will affect the speed of curing of that new batch, yep, but not so much that we're worried about, right.

All right, so you want to take over from here so where do you think, you know, looking at this now, what do you want to attack first, let me see, I guess I would probably go for the front, okay? Are there any places left here on what we've already worked on that could use a little bit of a dressing, right up around here and maybe right here, and so how would you address that? I think those are small areas so probably with a brush, right, sure. And again, you don't need to make them perfect with the brush, just get some on there, get wet in those places and then use the squeegee to see how that does, you get a feel for how stroking affects the cloth, yeah.

All right, so where are you going to go with that? Yeah, I guess right up here, right? You don't need to go with the roller any place it's already wet, right, there's no point in adding more epoxy if it's already wet out, right? You want to see it all wet out when you put the roller across but it takes time, it does take the time, yeah, so let it have the time while you address something else, right, because if you're trying to force it in there you're not making it get in

any faster, you're just taking time when you could be doing something else, right.

All right, so now how do you think you want to address that, now? I think the squeegee, right, sure, see what happens with the squeegee, I'm going to take some of this and start working down here while you're working up there, all right? And once again, we're just trying to move it around and get it uniform rather than at this stage, you can get it very good, don't worry about perfection because we'll have plenty of opportunity for that later, all right.

So, now I see that there's some places that need more, yep, so I can dab it in those places and if you have shiny spots, sometimes you can bring those shiny spots to a dry spot, you know, this area where a double layer, oh, it takes more resin, yeah, so it takes a little bit more resin, if you think it's going to take a lot, go ahead with something that's going to put a lot on and then rather than monkey around with it, yeah, yeah, but give it a chance to soak in, don't try and overwork it to get it to soak in, you know, you'll find if it's going in or not and if it needs a little bit more or not, down here, probably about the same thing, so one thing to take note of here is the stitch holding the form onto the deck, and it's right under the glass and we're just going to glass right over it and that'll be okay.

I was going to ask that question earlier, same thing up here on either shear, there's that little loop of wire going from the inside out into the forms that is okay, all right? So, we still have epoxy in our tray here, we don't want it to sit there for too long, so I'm going to take this and just start to go around the combing here. So, if I were doing this myself, I would probably have to use much smaller batches because I don't go as quickly at it as you do, yeah, yeah, you know, and that's what you're trying to sort of calibrate yourself with, it's okay to take a long time to do this but try to avoid having a batch of epoxy sitting in the bucket for a long time, okay?

So, let's see where this gets us, so there's a lot of contour here, a lot of chances for bridging, yep, so you'll sort of get a feel for what aggravates the bridging and what doesn't and we can always fix the bridging but if we get a light touch it won't cause too much bridging and it won't take that much effort to fix. So, I'm just going to take some of the drags out of the bottom of the tray, find the spots that are looking a little dry and just blur some right on there, and remember once it all looks wet out, you don't need to work on that spot anymore, so you're finding interesting places in down in those contours to deal with, yeah, quite a bit of bridging, but by lifting the cloth here on the side and then getting it to lay down, it works pretty well like you say you kind of get a feel for how much you can pull or push on it.

One of the things we can also do here is if we have a lot of trouble, there's this whole area of cloth here that is affecting cloth on either end and around it, we can cut that, oh right, yeah, so this whole section in here can be cut out, so you have a bridge here so if we cut this it could move right, it allows, and we have it's sagging here a little bit so there's actually some room to take up some slack there, so by poking a little bit with the brush it just kind of flattens, all right?

So, I'm going to take this new batch and just start to get this all right big area wet out. One thing we need to remember is we do want to come all the way up to the edge here we have this bevel here, we don't need to wrap it onto that bevel but we want to come up to the edge of that bevel, here's a place let's zoom in on that a little bit, so we have some bridging here that bridging we've got fibers running this way and fibers running this way which way do you, you know which fibers do you think aren't long enough, there the ones running this way, right the ones are running four and half and I just took when I put this epoxy down back on the back deck here, here I took the squeegee from here and started going back and what did that do to that bridging?

So, it raised it up. If I take the squeegee and run this way, that bridging goes away, right? Because this will pull the cloth away from that hollow area, this pushes it into that hollow area. So, at this end, we're just going to need to look. Are there any spots that look a little dry? You know, you can come in with a brush full here and there. Pretty good, hey? Yeah, looks great.

So, I've got some minor spots here where it's showing a little bit of white. I think those are just pits that were not, you know, we didn't sand down below those pits. I wouldn't worry about it too much. You can try and dab a little epoxy in there. Okay, that soaked it up. Up here, we've got some places where the rough edge of the fillet is sort of creating little bubbles. We can see if we can fill those up, but basically, this looks very good.

So, we still have epoxy, and we still have that whole end of the boat down there. Down in here, we have some classic bridging. I'm just going to take my brush, lift the edge of the cloth, and push the cloth down into that. You might think the best way to get rid of that is just to add more epoxy. It's... It kind of looks the same as not enough epoxy, but really, it's not enough cloth. So, what do you think this is going to be like here?

Yeah, it's... There's a lot going on here. Yeah, but we've got everything nicely laid down ahead of it. Now we want to try and coax it down as neatly as possible. So, when I'm rolling it on here, I'm not pressing too hard because I don't want to drag the cloth around. I just want to sort of press it down into place. All right, you see as I roll past here, the cloth puckers and moves, but the idea is the same. Just get some glass on there and get some epoxy on, and, you know, see what it looks like, and then add more as necessary.

All right, the tool for this is going to be more this... the... Yeah, the add more. The brush is going to be the way to go, and there's going to be bridging that we'll have to deal with. We can always make some little darts or gussets or, like, little slices in the glass, but we'd rather not. It's stronger if we don't cut the glass. Less cutting, more strength. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, so here we've got a nice classic bridge there. Just going to feed some cloth down from the side here. You see these wrinkles going this way. That indicates the tension is running that way. Right, right, so I don't really have cloth to... Well, I actually do have a seam right back here, so this overlap, there's a seam there. So, if I pulled cloth from there all the way up to here, I might be able to get that bridging to go away. Let's just see what happens with that. So, I'm going to start down near that seam and just pull up this way, and you see that the wrinkles just collapse. Okay, beautiful thing.

So, now I have a bridge. So, if going across this way, I need some down from the side. This has this big blob where we're going to have the sort of finger holes in the front hatch. So, that makes sort of an interesting contour to go over. It's not terribly difficult to get it to lay down on it. Yeah, it's... You'd think it would have a lot more trouble than it does. Yeah, I thought I was going to have a difficult time getting it over that. So, again, think about what is creating that spot there, right? Is there a lack of epoxy, or is it a bridge? It's a lack of cloth, yeah, yeah. So, the other place we can pull cloth from... So, this isn't going to do anything for the cloth that's on the boat, you know? It's not cutting the cloth that's on the boat. This is not part of the boat. That allows us to just move it down a little, yeah, look at that. Beautiful. And so, again, we still have some lengthwise wrinkles here, but I can push those down because now I have room to pull it from there.

Work down the boat a little farther. All right, so what do you think of the roller versus the dump and spread? For me, the roller is easier, yeah. Because getting the right tension on this to spread it all around is difficult, but this, you don't have to worry about that. You just get it on there, and it just seems to go easier for me. I don't know why.

One thing I think I mentioned on the hull is cutting off the excess cloth can help. It tends to, like, right here, we have a little bit of lifting at that edge. The weight of the cloth hanging over the side tends to peel that up. So, by trimming it back, now that can lay down more easily. Oh, yeah, there it goes. I like to have an excess just in case stuff shifts around or, you know, we've got a bridging or something that needs more cloth. Having plenty of excess on there, we can move things around as needed. But eventually, trimming off the remaining excess is good.

The roller has got quite a bit of epoxy soaked into it, so let's just squeeze some of that excess out. The other thing is, I think, with the roller, you don't tend to get as much excess.

Yeah, well, if we weren't being judicious, in judicious, you know, because it's easy to just keep on rolling until it's wet out, right? And you know, it's... My speech trying to tell you not to do that, I think helps, yeah. You know, if you pour a big puddle, you've got a big puddle, and you've got to move it around. I find the puddle method very quick, but, you know, it... It takes a little bit of practice. This, I think, probably, if you don't have the practice, this is probably an easier way to go about it.

The method gets the product on the boat quicker, yeah, but then requires more finesse in moving it, yeah, yeah. So, I still want to do the grunge cup.

Okay, so this is a paper cup, just a regular Dixie cup, and I cut a little bit of a slot in it, just like that. And I tend to cut it... The paper cups have a place where the paper's doubled up. I cut into that slot just so it has a little bit more beef in there to work with. And just make that cut.

This honestly looks very good, but you can see in the video here, there's some shiny spots and this long drip here we'd like to get rid of that in the long run. So, I take the cup, the squeegee with moderate pressure, run it across all the way up, and now I've got that excess built up on the squeegee. Just run it right through the slot, and I go down the whole length in both directions.

That didn't take off a huge amount, which is excellent. We're not wasting a lot. You see now there's no shiny spots on here. We do have a little bit of bridging, so the bridging... How do we get rid of the bridging? Moving the cloth. We move the cloth in towards the bridge so it's not pressure on the bridge itself, it's moving cloth into it.

Okay, so we're going to do the whole length of the boat with that grunge cupping, and it may end up messing things up here and there, but if we're quick about it, and being so warm, this part that we did first is actually pretty close to set up. It's not completely set up, but not a lot's coming off, yeah.

Yeah, it will be places where there's a lot coming off. Right here, oops. So, now I'm just feeding cloth back into that bridging, and this is a chance to do an inspection, see if there's any dry spots that need more epoxy.

Getting all the way up to that top edge, the grunging is basically for the inside of the boat. It's just a matter of reducing the weight of the boat, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, as I mentioned on the hull too, much epoxy actually makes the material more brittle, okay? So, having just the right ratio of epoxy to glass will be the strongest. In an ideal world, it's 50% epoxy, 50% glass, you know? We're not going to, like, measure that or anything, but more than that actually starts making the boat weaker.

Yeah, this went very well, hey? Not bad, huh?

Yeah, that looks pretty nice.

Yeah, that looks great. This looks really nice. We can see some minor shiny spots, but really most of it, we're really seeing the texture of the cloth. Up in here, that's... That's nice, texture of the cloth, just like we're supposed to see it, which is perfect. All right, I think that went well. What do you think?

Yeah, it looks great.

Yeah, no, that went really smoothly.

So, you know, my way of doing the hull with the dump and spread method, it's one way to do it. Here, we use a roller to sort of distribute the epoxy. There's lots of ways to do this. You could do it all with a brush. You can do the dump and spread. You can do it all with a roller, never use a brush.

I like to use a squeegee to spread it out once we've got enough epoxy on there, spread it around a little bit, and that way, we're not overloading the thing with too much epoxy. There's not one right way to do this, right? It's... The general thing we're trying to accomplish is we want to saturate the cloth with epoxy. We don't want to saturate it with too much, and we want to do it quick enough that the epoxy is not thickening up, right?

So, really, the key to that is small batches, small B. We did four or five batches. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you keep them small. If you're sitting with your bucket of epoxy in your hot, sweaty hand, that is going to kick off pretty quickly.

But putting it in the roller tray spreads it out, that starts to keep it cool, and then really the best place for it is on the boat. The quicker you can get it on the boat, the easier and better job you're going to have with your fiberglass work. Getting it out of the bucket, out of the tray, onto the boat, and then spreading it around.

So, you know, last time I talked about not wetting it out with the brush, and but this time you, it seemed you had a better idea of what I meant by just getting it onto the boat, where we weren't trying to wet it out, yeah, just moving along quicker, getting the product on the boat, and then, once it's all nice, nice, if there's little spots, you can visit.

Right, we... We didn't try to keep on using the roller until it looked clear.

No, no, it was... It's quite white in many spots, and how long did it take to soak in? Not long, a minute or so, yeah, but it was a minute or so. It wasn't a tenth of a second. It doesn't just happen, right? It does take some time to wet it out, to wet it out. So, keep applying more until it's wet out, overkill, it's... Yeah, it's unnecessary, yeah, but this is nice. You can really see the fabric pattern.

No, this came out great. And, you know, on your own boat, that's going to be a thing the first time you do it, it's not going to be as good as the last time you do it, and, you know, that's just learn. So, don't worry about getting it perfect. We're trying to get the boat reinforced.

And I was having a discussion with Bill. I've made a decision with my boats to glass the whole interior. We could take fiberglass tape and just run it down the seams. The wood's strong enough that we don't really need glass everywhere. We are really most interested in reinforcing the seams.

But, you know, I know how I use my boats. You've seen how I use my boats, yeah, they're a tool, yeah, I... I T, you know, I'm not afraid to bounce into things. So, I feel the glass provides an extra layer of strength, or on the whole flat panel of the plywood.

And if we're taping just the seams, the pre-woven tape, we can get in a 2-inch wide tape, is 9 oz per square yard. What we're using here is 4 oz per square yard. That's sort of the equivalent. A 2-inch tape of 9 oz is a 4 and 1/2 inch or 4 and 1/4 inch wide piece of 4 oz cloth.

So, if you had 4 and 1/2 inch here, there's not a lot of wood that's no longer covered with glass, you know, the wide panels, sure, but it's not that we don't want epoxy everywhere. We still want epoxy everywhere, even if we're not glassing everywhere. Epoxy provides the waterproofing protection for the wood. One coat of epoxy would not protect it from the water. There'd still be pinholes in that.

So, we want to come through and put at least three coats of epoxy on any bare wood that we have remaining, okay? By putting the glass down, I've made sure there's epoxy on everything. It's a glass thickness worth of epoxy, which is more, probably, than the three coats. To me, it feels like I'm saving time because to do those three coats, that's three separate operations. Coming back and doing it here, I'm kind of done. I could contemplate doing a fill coat on the inside after this. We did on the hull, and I kind of like that, just as a belt and suspenders to make sure everything's sealed and for applying varnish to it allows us to sand it. It's not a requirement. Okay?

I'd say we could call this done. Could, doesn't need anything more. Okay, we could also put a coat of epoxy on this in a couple of hours, then, you know, next week sometime, sand it down and varnish the interior. Uh-huh, that would be better, quote-unquote, okay, and that's better just because if there was a pocket or something that it would be, yeah.

One thing you can see sometimes with stitch-and-glue boats is if they're put away wet with the hatches closed and then put on the roof of your car, this hatch area is going to warm up, the sun's going to hit the boat and warm the boat up, and this becomes a very, very high humidity area, okay? With the hatch closed, all that water in there, it just sort of turns into humidity, yeah, and so, that whole enclosed space has humidity in it, yep, which... It's also pressurized because it's hot, so it's pushing that hot anything at all out through any little spot it can find, it, you know, it's not a big problem, it can create sort of a dark look to the wood in certain spots. And so, the fill coat and some varnish can help prevent that. You do your best, the more coats you put on, the less likely something like that's going to happen.

The other solution to that is don't close the hatches, yeah, put the boat on the roof of your car without the hatches on, that way it airs out, dries out, probably better for the boat. Probably better.

I'd say we can call this done. I'll decide later whether we're calling this done. I've already shown the fill coat thing, so for people watching, it's a decision that's up to you. I'd say this is it for this episode, okay? In the next episode, I think we will plan on... There's some bits and pieces that need some fiberglassing. The bulkheads, the hip braces or what I call cheek plates, the combing lip part of... I'm going to put a skag in this boat, so there's some bits and pieces I want to get some fiberglass on. Let's plan on doing that the next episode, okay?

If you're interested in building this boat yourself, Chesapeake Light Craft sells a kit. I have plans if you want to build from scratch. If you want to support what I'm doing here, there's a Patreon page where money donated from that goes to support my production of these videos my Patreon supporters get first access to the videos generally about a week before everybody else does other ways to support buy a kit buy a set of plans subscribe to the YouTube channel buy a t-shirt there should be a thing under the video on YouTube advertising these t-shirts I'll try and put a thing up in one of the corners link to that this is a sweatshirt I've got t-shirt sweatshirts really what we're trying to do here is get you guys interested in building your own boat so buy that for me buy that there's lots of other designers out there with great boats you know Whatever Gets You building boats that makes me happy so until the next episode thanks for watching and happy paddling.