After a couple of days of it being too cold to glue, yesterday I glued the 4 pieces of cockpit reinforcement that I cut on Tuesday. The instructions said to mix in some wood flour into the epoxy to make it “the consistency of honey”, which is odd because I think of normal epoxy as being about that consistency normally. It also didn’t say how much to mix up, so I did one squirt of resin (1 ounce) and hardener (1/2 ounce).
Before I mixed in the flour, I used some of the epoxy to fix one of the joins where the cloth actually came up off the wood – I crammed in the epoxy with the stir stick and then put the mylar sheet on top and several brick on top. I wasn’t expecting perfection, but I’m hoping it will be less obvious that it was before.
The gluing went ok, but I nearly ran out of epoxy at the end. The first one had lots of epoxy running out the side when I put the bricks on, and the last had absolutely none.
This evening I checked on it and took off the bricks. The join fix came out about as well as I’d hoped – it sticks up a bit and it’s obvious if you look, but I think it won’t be horribly obvious to bystanders. I’m hoping it will be less obvious when it comes time to glass the whole thing. (But if you want to embarrass me, it should be on the left side of the deck very near the stern)
The reinforcement plates had the usual sorts of problems. One of them stuck to the table where the spillage missed the plastic I’d put under it, and I had to scrape off the stuck on table wood with the cabinet scraper. Another one had some scmutz from the brick stuck to the top, and I scraped that off as well. But the one where I’d used up the last of the epoxy seems to be stuck on good and tight, so no worries there.