Pretty exciting day so far but it looks like things have worked out fine.
At lunch I figured I should turn up the heat in the shop to get ready for the epoxy work tonight. Felt colder than usual when I walked in and the furnace didn't kick on when I tried to turn up the heat. Oh shoot! I ran out of propane! Get back to work, call the guy, and he says he'll be there in 20 minutes. 45 minutes later the furnace is kicking out the BTUs and we're back in business! My chickens were happy to have a visitor and I gave him some eggs as a tip.
Get home from work early and start getting things ready. Seems like wetting out 3 layers of cloth on the boat would be a real hassle so I decided to wet them out before putting them on the gunwales. For that I'd need a large, flat, and clean surface. That darned piece of foil faced foam that made me so mad the other night was perfect:
20150326_001 by
Alan Gage, on Flickr
That's 3" kevlar that goes down first. Then 4" carbon followed by 4" fiberglass.
I spread a coat of epoxy on the cedar gunwales and also a thin coat on the hull where the fabric would make contact. Then I used a roller to wet out the length of kevlar and placed it on the gunwale and started smoothing it out. I was glad to see the plain woven fabric had no trouble conforming to the curves without wrinkling but I was a bit dismayed that it had no desire to actually hold that shape! It just kept pulling away and adding more epoxy didn't seem to help it stick. Maybe this is where the double bias weave cloth Stripperguy used would come in handy!?
I didn't know what to do other than keep going and hope with more layers it would get better. Even though I knew the vacuum bag would pull it tight and hold it I didn't know how I'd ever get everything properly positioned and wrinkle free before sealing it up. So I wet out the carbon fabric and laid it over the kevlar and things started to look a little better. It would hold position for a little while before pulling away from the sides again but not as bad. The fiberglass tape went on last and at this point it held shape pretty well, only pulling away in the corners a little at the transition from gunwale to hull. I breathed a sigh of relief. The vacuum bag shouldn't have any problem taking care of that and placing the different layers inside the bag will be much easier with the fabric staying mostly in place.
I switched into a clean pair of gloves before the next step and took a quick picture:
20150326_002 by
Alan Gage, on Flickr
Then I started placing the different layers inside the vacuum bag, which was a little tedious. Especially the outer layer of bag film and trying to get it to be as smooth as possible where it contacted the tacky tape.
The second excitement of the day occurred when it was time to install the vacuum adapter. A normal person would have gotten everything out and ready before starting something like this but I'm not a normal person. I knew right where the adapter should be and was a bit troubled when it wasn't there. I also knew some places it shouldn't be and it wasn't there either! So I start looking through the multitude of drawers and boxes in my shop trying to figure out where the heck I could have put it. And all the while the epoxy clock is tick, tick, ticking. Getting a bit panicky I was about to go with the backup plan of cutting the fitting off my hose and just jamming it inside the bag and doping up the penetration with tacky tape to try and seal when I stopped one last time to think really hard about where that adapter was. I knew I had it just the other day when I made that thwart and.....Aha!.....I remembered that when I unwrapped the thwart and threw away all the bag materials they felt surprisingly heavy. So I started digging through the garbage and, sure enough, I never took the adapter out of the bag and threw it away with the trash.
So now we're back and business and can finally seal up the bag and flip on the vacuum pump. Then use a J-roller to roll the tacky tape seam shut and then go over and try to seal up the obvious leaks and listen for the hiss from the not so obvious leaks. Slowly it's starting to pull into a vacuum and after fixing one large leak I can hear the vacuum pump make the happy sound it gets when there's a good seal and everything starts to get stretched really tight. Happy dance!
20150326_003 by
Alan Gage, on Flickr
20150326_004 by
Alan Gage, on Flickr
You can see the dark polka dots where excess resin is being forced out of the laminate and is being soaked up by the breather fabric:
20150326_005 by
Alan Gage, on Flickr
My bag film isn't long enough to cover the entire length of the canoe so I had to make a splice:
20150326_006 by
Alan Gage, on Flickr
Can't ask for much more than this:
20150326_007 by
Alan Gage, on Flickr
It won't hold when the valve is closed so I'll just let the pump keep running for a couple hours and try to seal up some more leaks later.
After the pump had pulled a good vacuum for about 15 minutes I bled it all off so that I could somewhat manipulate some large folds and used a skinny strip (with corners rounded) to press everything tightly into the corners before turning the pump back on. Very anxious for the unveiling tomorrow. I hope the cloth all stayed put and nothing got pulled out of sorts as the bag was tightening.
Alan
