After Sunday's (mis)adventure with fillets and fiberglass, I was ready for a straightforward task or two. Thursday I got them. The two tasks were to clean up the edges of the fiberglass and to remove the rest of the stitches. Oh, and I picked up the boatworks a bit and put my work bench back on the sawhorses. No pictures of that, sorry. I know you're disappointed...
After last time, the fiberglass looked like this:
In fact I've already removed a little bit so that you can see the painters tape underneath. I trimmed the overhanging fiberglass edge all around the boat:
... and removed the tape.
After that it was time to get those stitches out. Remember the Mad Max look?
All the remaining stitches are entombed in epoxy on the inside of the boat. The hardest part was finding a wire cutter that would cut flush. Now it looks more like this:
Overall this was pretty relaxing. There is still some work to be done on the fiberglass around the bulkheads and a few spots on the edges that need some epoxy, but over all I think the fiberglass came out ok.
Due to my poor fillets from before, I have some air bubbles which I'm going to try and fill with epoxy in the future. Reading on the Chesapeake Light Craft forums, it looks like this is a common problem. People (including mom, hi mom!) suggested drilling a hole in the air bubbles and injecting epoxy (with a second hole for the air to escape).
Also, the stitches in the bottoms of the bulkheads are still there, and will stay until we flip the boat. The boat is just too close to the floor to get under there with the wire cutter. All that said, I'm happy with how it's coming out.
