More Canoe Stuff

[catsittingstill]

So.

I ended up liking the epoxy sawdust color better than any of the wood putties.  It had a nice sort of honey color.  So I went with the epoxy-sawdust-fumed silica mix.  Why argue with tradition?  For working around the butternut, some phenolic microballoons mixed in made a darker mix.

Observations.

1) Canoez advised me to tape off the area around the patches, so as not to get the mix on the surface of the wood any more than necessary.  Canoez is wise.  I will listen to Canoez when he tells me these things in the future.

2) The sweatband judifilksign suggested helped.  The N95 mask Jerusha suggested is considerably less nasty than the dust masks I have worn in the past.  The valve really does seem to help keep my glasses from fogging over, as advertised.  Using syringes to measure epoxy and hardener, as randwolf suggested, works well.

3) Since I foolishly did not tape around my patches the first day, they ended up coming out kind of blotchy.  However sanding them fair to the hull, which I had expected to be difficult, turned out to be easy enough with a longboard and 80 grit sandpaper. 

4) And the last stage fine-sanding-after-wetting-down-to-raise-the-grain took out *most* of the blotches, so it didn't look nearly as bad as I feared for a while it was going to.

I woke up at 6:00am this morning, so I got up.  It was something approaching cool at that hour, which was good because I had forgotten to open the windows and start the fan in my shop last night.  I did that right away, plus opened the big doors, and dropped the temperature four degrees in an hour.

I was polite and did not start fine sanding the hull (outside) until 8 am.  I still finished by about 10, and moved the canoe back inside.  I thought about it and decided that it would work to seal the hull today.  (I like to give the hull a "sealer coat" of epoxy before I try to fiberglass--it reduces problems with the epoxy soaking into the hull and being drawn away from the fiberglass and I think it will also reduce bubbles.)  My main concern was whether it would be non-tacky by the time I need to cover the hull because the afternoon sun is coming through the west windows.  If it is not ready I have a lot of cardboard; I will cut cardboard inserts for the windows to block the sun.

I got a bowl full of ice that I set the epoxy cup in while I was stirring the resin and hardener together.  Epoxy solidifies faster if it's hot so I thought I would buy myself a few extra minutes by pre-chilling it.  It seemed to work okay.  I keep forgetting to throw the ice out in a timely way, though.

The wood looks *so* beautiful.  This boat will be positively gaudy.

So I guess I'm seriously moving on the canoe again.  The next step will be fiberglassing.

Comments

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

In my experience, sanding epoxy is not bad soon after is sets, but it continues to harden over days and weeks until sanding is extremely difficult.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

yes. The drawback to sanding not-fully-cured epoxy is that the dust is highly irritating to some people. Like poison oak. It can be done--but one is advised to wear a mask, which is uncomfortable in Tennessee.