2088Hrs – A Happy Ship!

I only had a couple of hours on ‘Gleda’ today. I’m keen to get started on the filling but with other commitments it looks like it’ll be Sunday before I can get started.

By way of preparation though I dug out my various spreaders and steel trowels and gave them a good clean ready to use. I also pre-mixed  some neat epoxy resin with silica. I was given this tip by Wiz Deas of MCMC in Bristol, they’ve been my preferred supplier of Sicomin Epoxy for this project and Wiz has always been ready with help and advice when I’ve needed it. When I was talking to him about making up a filler mix he advised pre-mixing the silica with neat resin some 24 hours before use, reason being that the silica really doesn’t absorb the epoxy very quickly so if you use it immediately you get a grainier mix that’s harder to rub down. His recommendation was to mix in 1 gram of silica to every 100 grams of resin so I’ve mixed up a batch of 1500 grams ready to use on Sunday. I’ll then add the slow hardener and glass micro balloons to get the consistency I want. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

Once that was done I decided to grab the jigsaw and cut some more holes in the boat! Well actually I was a little more careful than that may sound and took some time marking out for the two round perspex windows I’d decided to put in each of the forward facing sections of the cabin tops. I was equally careful cutting them out and I’m really pleased with the look. I’ll be fixing the perspex using the method developed by Boatsmith and detailed on Scott’s Tiki 26 blog a while back.

When I stood back to admire my handy work I realised ‘Gleda’ now had a happy face!