Commander 147

[ebb]

Hey jerry,
To stick heavy mat to the overhead you're going to have to figure out a way to hold it up there until it sets. I don't know what.
But it occurs to me if you have to go to the trouble of supporting the cloth with thick cardboard and a miriad of battens to hold it all up there....

why not skip the catortionist wet matt stuff and just support the deck with just enough pressure on the underdeck from spring battens to support recoring the deck from the top.

The argument would be that you are probably going with closed cell pvc foam and epoxy and glass. The green foam I've used has to be considered structural. Marvelous stuff.
You will end up with a very strong composite. Stronger because epoxy sticks better to the foam than it does to end grain balsa.

On the Ariel the foredeck has a plank of plywood down the center from the stem to the cabin. No balsa there. And probably no rot because I found the stip had been isolated from the balsa. Effectively separating the balsa into separate islands. If you are replacing that you could do first one side then the other. You could do the same along the side decks. You'd just make sure you married the sections together real good where they meet.

Glass matt, while very strong, soaks up an extraordinary amount of epoxy. I haven't done it but imco the stuff will be too heavy to stick to the roof, it'll want to pull away, so it will have to be supported everywhere. However, I think you could get away with pasting 6oz glass cloth overhead. Cloth would allow easier filling and fairing too.


TOE RAIL
Filling the inside of the toerail will take a huge amount of expensive epoxy. I know - I filled A338's toerail stem to stem. What's that, 52 feet of 1 1/2"X 1 1/2"X 1 1/2" of fill? Plus waste, squeeze out, and pot life fiascos!
I 'cheated' by jamming one foot long pieces of wood up in there with lots of epoxy gel reinforced with chopped strand. The wood was milled to make a flat bottom inside easy to fair with the deck. In some places you'd never know the hollow toerail was ever there.
Using wood chunks cut roughly to fit could be jammed in the cove and the squeeze-out cleaned up easy because the pieces didn't need to be braced or fastened.
Now there is more wood than plastic inside all along the cove which makes it very friendly to screws and thru-fastenings anytime later.

Just ideas.