Filleting and Glassing Bow and Cuddy

There is not much to report but Jan thinks I should keep people up-to-date.  Around May 18, I did some filleting in the bow area.

The fillets are pretty ugly--you have to practically stand on your head to get at the lower ones.  Some of the builders do a beautiful job in here although I don't know how they do it--I did the best I could.  This area will be filled with foam and never seen again so I'm not too concerned about appearances--mainly I need the fillets to be strong and provide smooth curves for the fiberglass cloth

Here I've added the fiberglass cloth and resin on May 20:

Looks pretty horrible.  Again, I did the best I could.  As I said it is very hard to reach and there are some tight compound curves for the cloth to conform to as much as possible. In the very bottom corner where I want to make sure there is a good seal, I poured in some more epoxy, approximately 1/2" deep.

Today (June 15), the weather was unseasonably cool.  It was about 77 degrees in the garage, so I decided to get some more filleting done in the "cuddy" area.

I was able to get the fillets smoothed out fairly well, although still having to get into some rather contorted positions to get to the lower fillets on the floor joists.  They don't look all that pretty, but the cloth should go on fine and they will be hidden under the floorboards.

I did the upper fillet to the port side back in early June when the garage was about 84 degrees.  I don't know why, but at the end you can't see in this photo the epoxy began curing much sooner than I expected.  I should have had about four hours before it set to the point I could no longer smooth it, but after waiting about one hour it had become way too hard.  So there will be a lot of sanding and grinding to do there.  I won't do any more of this kind of work until late September, unless we get some more very cool weather in the summer.  There are other things I can do in the meantime--e.g., more work on the spars, and I may start on the floorboards even though the cuddy filleting may not all be finished.