The white gown

İ am not sure my boat is a HE or a SHE..... but it sure looked that a bride about to get married in her beautiful white gown ! İ had tears in my eyes just to think about walking her down the aisle....

At least just before İ dropped a few liters of goey resin on top of it all and came back to reality !

No much to say on lamination of the top half of the boat except İ went nuts and did it in one shot.....and alone ! No one near to help...So İ had to be rather focused not to screw it up. Boy, that is a big area to laminate ! Took me certainly much more time and resin than expected....But İ pulled it out and İ am happy with the result.

As far as methodology, this really reminded me surfboard lamination which İ had some experience with while at school.

First, İ prepared the hull and wrapped newspaper all around the hull. İ left a clean space of about 15 cm wide on the sides which would be later used to fold the deck cloth onto the hull sides. İ will do the same laminating the hull, therefore overlapping the boat deck to hull sides with a total of 2 fibercloth layers.

Then İ layed the cloth on the deck. My fiber roll is only 80 cm wide so it took me some thinking to do it as effectively as possible.

1-I unrolled two long pieces of cloth and layed them on the side-upper-decks from bow tip to transom. That cloth was wide enough to hang on one side to wrap the deck-to-hull edges, and on the other side to wrap the sidedecks-to-topdecks rounded edges.

2-two more long pieces were used on each side-decks. They would overlap over the rounded sidedecks-to-topdecks rounded edges

3-two more pieces were used for the cockpit sole.

4-2 smaller pieces were used on cabin top.

To hold the fabric in place, İ used the same little pins İ used at the beginning of construction to hold the Tyvek patterns in place before spraying paint...Good memories !

Next was dropping the previously mixed resin from the bucket along the cockpit side and use my long squeege to spread the resin around. The squeegee was used in long smooth strokes, no pressure at all, just moving this wave of resin along the cloth in "S" movements.İt is a fun process to see the weave immediatly getting wet and İ worked my way from bow to stern.

After that initial wet out, İ applied more pressure and squeezed all excess resin out. İ gently moved this excess towards the edges and just let it drip on the cloth hanging on the sides.

Than İ folded the sides onto the hull squeezing hard not to leave too much resin in the cloth.

Did pretty much the same for the cabin and the cockpit floor. And finally İ used a foam roll to spread the resin evenly and remove all excess.

İt was all done in about 3 hours of hard work.

Here are some pictures to illustrate:

BEFORE