It's hard to tell there's any fibreglass involved!Silly Car wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2026 10:04 pm Day four - got to the workshop this morning to find the hull plywood had gassed (created bubbles in the finished fibreglass from air taped in the plywood released as a result of outer veneer softening slightly from resin and heat) so I've got around a dozen bubbles to sand out and patch before deciding on weather to paint or varnish the hull.
The only way to have solved the problem was to have cranked up the heating in the workshop to higher than the outside temperature (26°C) before the resin had started to cure to force out the trapped air and to pierce the bubbles and push them back down to the ply surface, then watch for any more appearing (repeating the same again) until resin had sufficiently cured to lock in any further issues.
Today, we sanded and glassed the deck as early as we could so we could keep an eye on it as it cured before applying a fill coat to cover up the weave of the fibreglass. A bit of a shame as we'd go the fabric on pretty much perfectly and the pattern was carbon fibre esq.
Fitted and clamped the combing ring, epoxied and glassed various components for fitting tomorrow.
...pix..
You can never use to many clamps! The grain of the sapele looks gorgeous and iooks very close to what it will be like when finished with varnish.
That's v cool.
(I planned to go to the USA on a birch-bark canoe building course once. (The course cost was by the foot/length of the canoe - the longer you made it the more the course cost). Didn't happen for a few reasons inc. the cost of getting it back here).
