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Wife, children, boy friends, girl friends and neighbors were pressed into service with the promise of wonderful Caribbean cruising.
I got everything prepared by cutting the glass to size and labeling each piece. Then I cut the breather and peel ply and lightly glued them together with spray adhesive to save time. (If you do this, use the 3M high strength stuff. The other brands may work OK for gluing paper but they are not worth a flip for this!) I laid in a supply of vinyl gloves from the drug store which I found held up much better than the light latex gloves and a dozen pair of heavy latex gloves for the lay-up crew. Nytril gloves work fine with West 205 hardener but fall apart in 209 slow hardener and liquefy with ProSet. I also picked up a dozen Tyvek suits from Granger.
I coated the hull with regular epoxy about a week before we started laminating to prevent the wood from soaking the ProSet out of the glass and washed the hull down with Scotch Bright pads the day before to eliminate any blush. I ran a strip of vacuum sealing tape around the perimeter of the hull and covered it with masking tape to prevent any epoxy messing up the seal.
Early one Saturday in March we started. In our white Tyvek suits we almost looked like we knew what we were doing! The crew consisted of one mixer, three spreaders and four layers with me running around in growing panic.
I had build a combination wet out/vacuum table out of melamine coated particle board and the spreaders got to work. The first thing we found out was that a 50" by 14' sheet of wet glass is not an easy thing to handle. That problem was solved by rolling it up on a 2" piece of plastic pipe. It could then be carried to the hull and rolled out with very little wrinkling.
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