Fiberglassing

After the blog post about how to mix the epoxy for fiberglassing, it is time to post about the actual fiberglassing. The process is actually quite simple, seeing that I read so much about it that I was so nervous. But my neighbor was there to help me apply my first coat and he assured me that it was not that complicated. The night before I had clean the canoe surface with a cloth and had blown out the entire area around the canoe with a pneumatic blower. Before fiberglassing, I thought sanding would never end and I thought of giving up the whole project all together, because of the monotony of it, yet the fun of fiberglass totally made up for it. First, I laid out the 4 oz. cloth and wet it out with the mixture of epoxy and hardener. After 24 hours, when this dried I did it again. So now I had 8 ounces of cloth all the way around the entire canoe. However, after each cloth dried, the excess had to be cut off with a knife or scissors (which ever was more accessible.) The bottom picture is the canoe after two coats of epoxy. I laid 6 oz. Fiberglass tape on the stems to ensure strength and the tape needs a couple more coats to fully wet out. But in all this step was a lot of fun because you could see the beauty of the colors become very vibrant, when you were so used to seeing whitish sanded wood. The next step is to sand the fiberglass to ensure that it is smooth throughout...