Old Man Takes Up Rowing

This morning, I watched some videos about wetting out fiberglass on plywood hulls. Here they are, in case you, too, need inspiration and encouragement: Jenkins Boat Works video glassing a CLC Chesapeake 18 Nick Schade’s video glassing a Guillemot Petrel OffCenterHarbor’s video includes tips on the tips. I trimmed the fiberglass to leave only an…

Here’s the entirety of the instructions in the Book of the Oxford Shell about how to glass the hull: Cover the outside of the hull with fiberglass cloth. Drape the cloth over the entire hull then saturate it with unthickened epoxy; work from the center toward the edges with brush or roller. When the first…

As promised: I used some epoxy thickened with recent sanding dust to fill in small gaps near both ends of the hull. This goop is very dark, like chocolate rather than peanut butter, but it will do. After it hardened for a few hours, I moved the boat off the table, put down a sheet…

I released the clamps holding the hull for taping and flipped it keel-up. Pressed paper inserts from shipments of wine make excellent pads between the boat and the tabletop. It’s miraculous how rigid these floppy strips of plywood have become. That’s engineering, boys (not mine, but engineering just the same). There were ~180 stitches in…

I laid the second strips of seam tape this morning — all morning, or so it felt. I sanded the originals to get a rough bonding surface and to level the lower edges. Epoxy apparently migrates to the lower edge of fiberglass tape by gravity or by wicking, cures, and leaves a substantial ridge there.…