greybeard canoes & kayaks

No matter how many boats you’ve built, each build invariably provides a humbling lesson.

For this build, and having fiberglassed many times before, I opted for some faster curing epoxy. I was better at it, after all. Knew my business. Right?

Wrong.

Having wetted out maybe a quarter of the canoe, the epoxy started to kick/react, and I was left with a steaming pot of epoxy with no reasonable way of applying it without totally butchering the job. In the end, I capitulated, peeled off the fiberglass I’d wetted and rescued as much of the unwetted cloth as I could.

So it was back to what I knew best — slow cure epoxy applied at temperatures near 20 degrees Celsius. (This temperature limit comes as a result of another hard-earned lesson. With my last boat. I applied a coat of epoxy at 10ish degrees. It never cured properly and remained tacky.)

At any rate, back to this build. Armed with slow-curing hardener, I tackled the task again. This time, things went smoothly and the fiberglass went on with no appreciable air bubbles (I sealed the hull with a coat of epoxy before glassing). After that, I filled the weave with three more coats, using a pretty saturated foam roller to apply the epoxy, and a foam brush to smooth it out and remove the minuscule bubbles that would appear.

With that done, it’s time to flip the boat and sand the inside.