This is a blog post about bubbles.
Wait...
Ok, these bubbles turned out not to be much fun. In fact, these bubbles were a real problem... I'm talking about air bubbles under my fiberglass, mostly along the seam between the bottom panel and the first side panel. They look kinda like this. (Ignore the holes for the moment). The light patch along the seam in between the drilled holes is what I'm talking about.
This is a result of laying the fiberglass poorly. :( The problem is that it makes a weak point on the seam and in the fiberglass. If you push on one of those spots you can see the epoxy in the fiberglass start to crack. That's no good!
However, I have a solution! Now note the holes drilled in the bubble above. And below.
This was mildly nerve wracking.
So the solution is to drill a few holes and inject clear epoxy into the bubbles. It looks something like this:
Best not to inject epoxy into yourself I suspect. This method was suggested by my mom (go mom!) and multiple posts on the Chesapeake Light Craft builder forums. I got some pretty clean results which hopefully won't show under more layers of epoxy (to be applied later). Somehow I managed not to take a picture of any of the filled bubbles, which you shouldn't be able to see anyway, so there shouldn't be much in the picture. Well, you know. We'll see.
On the bench, I finally got the mast step put together. The mast will be removable when the boat is complete. When you mount it in the boat, the bottom will rest in the mast step. The mast step came in the kit as three pieces which are now epoxied and screwed together.
That was about it for my week. Coming up next, this Sunday's (actually today as I'm writing this) 'railing against the system.' Incidentally, that was going to be the post title for the previous post (about installing rails, get it? rails? yeah) until I decided it was only funny in my head and not really funny there. Anyhoo.
Next time, more rails and maybe more bench projects.