Commander 147

[carl291]

Jerry, I bought some milled cotton fiber a couple years ago from fiberglass coatings in Fl , it was grey colored and lumpy and not very uniform at all really pretty crappy stuff to mix. I bought a couple more pounds of it this spring and this stuff was bleach white very uniform and dry feeling. Very nice stuff to mix in, kind of like silica. Don't know why the difference in quality but it is great to work with. I could never do the size area your doing all at one time, I work too slow and pot life "cooks" my goose. nice work!

[Commander 147]

Thanks Carl

I have bought a pretty good bit of stuff from Fiberglass Coatings, in St. Pete. I occasionally need to go down to that area and I always stop in to get whatever I'm running short of when I do. I get most of my fillers, green squeegees and glass rollers from them. They are pretty friendly and knowledgeable people.

[Commander 147]

Well we are finally getting a few days where the weather is not carzy hot and it makes working on Destiny a lot easier to do. So I'm starting to get the first area of the recore back together again.

The first picture shows my fastener boxes weighting the balsa core down while the tickened epoxy I set it in cured. First I wet out the bottom skin of the deck with unthickened epoxy and then the bottom of the balsa core itself. After that I tickened up some epoxy and troweled it on the bottom of the core with a 1/4" notched trowel. I flipped it over in place and pushed it down first by hand and then with a rubber roller to get it to seat properly. Then I set the full boxes of fasteners on top to hold it in place while it cured.

The second picture is how I made the pattern to cut the 1708 biax with. The sheet plastic was clear enough that I could see through it to draw the edges of the pieces of biax I needed to cut.

The third picture is how it looked shortly before I put the glass on top. I filled all the edges around the balsa core with thickened epoxy and faired it out so I would have a smooth transition for the glass that would go on top. The area in the center that is solid glass is where the winch riser will bolt through later. I put in 10 layers of 1708 biax in that area which brought it up close to the top of the balsa core and then faired it out with thickened epoxy to make it flush with the balsa core.

The forth picture is right after I finished putting 3 layers of 1708 biax on the top. Near the aft end of the work the deck was originally so thick that I will probably have to add a couple more layers in the middle to keep the faring compound thin when I fair it out later.

[carl291]

Looks good Jerry, When I do deck work I bend the balsa core over a piece of large PVC pipe and wet out the scribes in the balsa. In my mind I think it will make the deck stiffer and if it should leak at some time in the future it will slow down the spread of water. Do you see any benefit to my method? Yes it is a great time of the year to be doing this type of work, that 100 degree stuff was just too much.

[Commander 147]

Carl

Thanks for the tip, I can see how that would be a benefit to the final product. I did have epoxy wick up through the core and stick my fastener boxes to the deck so I probably got some of that with the way I did it. But your method does make sense to me so I will try it on the next section. This really is a learn as you go process for me. I've never done anything like this before. I think I will want to do small areas of core at a time with your method because I would be concerned about the epoxy starting to kick before everything was set in place correctly.

[carl291]

Your Welcome, I have never worked an area as large at one time as your doing, Working alone on that large of an area means you certainly have to have everything laid out perfectly to come within the kickoff on the Epoxy. I recored the coachroof on my Electra and set too much weight on it and bowed the roof in on both sides of the hatch. That sure caused a lot more work than I originally planned on, so I understand learn as you go very well.

[Commander 147]

Carl

I've been treating the epoxy work a lot like I do my woodworking. I always do a test clamp up when I glue up wood projects and use scrap pieces to test a tooling setup. So I always do a dry run for an epoxy layup also. I find I get better end results with less time (and money) invested by following that discipline.

For this project I only mixed 18oz's of epoxy at a time. I poured it straight from my mixing pot onto the deck and used a roller to roll it out. After each layer of glass was wet out I used a thin finned glass roller to roll out any bubbles in the material and then started all over again with the next layer. It went surprisingly well.