Step 8: Fiberglassing the Inside
As you can see above, I finally finished all the fillets, so it was time to fiberglass the inside. The outside of the hull gets fiberglassed with a big sheet of fiberglass cloth which covers it entirely. The inside, on the other hand, just gets a 3-4 inch wide strip of fiberglass tape down each seam. In addition, the bottom panels in the area where the cockpit will be gets fiberglassed with section of a sheet that I cut out before filleting.
After laying down the fiberglass and pressing it gently into the fillets (which were still wet), I just painted over it using a disposable brush and unthickened epoxy. I saturated the fiberglass completely but tried not to use more epoxy than needed. Also, I coated the exposed wood on the inside because the epoxy acts as a sealant.
As I did this step I discovered the one problem with doing this project in a building without doors or windows: Bugs! By 10 PM they were all over the place and I rushed to finish so I could get my newly coated surface under whatever protection my tarp system provided. In the future I will avoid doing any bulk application of epoxy after 4 o'clock. I think that the tarps did a pretty good job of protecting it but there were still quite a few casualties. Luckily this was only the inside so a few bugs add a certain character. Here is a picture of the boat under the tarp system I rigged up:
total page-views for the whole site since July 17, 2000.