Rub my bottom baby!
Oooh, it’s so smooth!
As I mentioned in my post yesterday, instead of enduring a night of absolute fibreglass hell I decided that it’d be better if I went home to get a decent shower. It was whilst at home I came up with my next course of action. About week ago I bought some perspex sheets for no particular reason. I just thought they might come in handy. As you do. I decided that I was going to cut them up and use them to fill the void left by the missing keel. Two issues, no glue and no way of drawing a straight line so before going down to the boat I popped into B&Q and acquired a long steel ruler, some solvent free glue a new scraper and a few other bits and pieces.
I eventually got down to the boat and began my new dastardly plan.
This process was not without incident. I managed to glue a paintbrush to a rag, I forgot to take the backing sticker off of one side of the perspex and my measurements weren’t great. I spent a whole lot of time grinding the edges of the perspex to get them to fit.
Happy with that I moved on to sanding the waterline down. I taped above the entire waterline to protect the sanding job I’d done previously and set to getting rid of the 15 layers of paint and about 305 years worth of barnacles.
An hour later I was done, what a ball ache though! I started by using my new scraper but that kept digging into the fibreglass and damaged it some more. I resorted to using the sander. Much easier but went through tons of sandpaper because whatever paint it was clogged the paper.
Masking tape manufacturers are fucking idiots!
Jeezuz H Christ! I swear to god I give up sometimes, there was me trying to do things right by masking off an area only for it to come back and haunt me. You see dear reader said masking tape is possibly the stickiest fucking tape in the known universe. It took me as long to take the masking off as it did to sand the fucking waterline! I managed it with the aid of tearing it off piece by piece and with the aid of the new scraper. More gouges in the carefully sanded part of the hull. And it’s left a sticky residue all down the side. It’s like she’s been at a bukake party for OCD people!
Over the last few days I’ve been washing the hull after each sanding, to keep the dust from collecting and to keep her as clean as possible. Cue another wash. Residue still not coming off. Looks like another sanding is in order.
I’ve never used fibreglass filler before and cautiously tested it out on two small areas (see above). Holy shit this stuff is amazing! It took a few tries to get the mix right , and I ground and cleaned the defects before applying the paste. I’m pretty impressed with the results. Bow down before me! I am the fibreglass master!
With my new found skills with fibreglass I decided it was time to sort the keel void out. I pretty much checked the rest of the hardner into the pot of paste and smeared that shit all over the void.
I need a whole lot more filler, to finish building it up. I’m collecting 2 pots on my way to the boat in the morning. I started shaping what fibreglass there was and came across an issue. Those perspex sheets are going to be in the way of me getting the shape right. Some grinding is in order. The plan is to finish the void up shape it, sand it so it’s ready for paint.
The next order of business? I’m going to use my steel ruler and a pencil and draw a grid on the hull above the waterline and use the filler to undo some of the damage from “Fuck Karate Kid!”. By the end of the day I’m hoping the hull will be ready for a lick of primer paint. That’ll be Monday’s job. Marine paint ain’t cheap though.
Oh, I need a new scraper. I should have read the instructions on the filler. Thinners, thinners are needed to keep your tools clean. I don’t have thinners. Another thing to add to my shopping list.