Bag it, Tag it, Sell it to the butcher at the store..

Finally ready to get some stuff done today. Been doing alot of prep the last few days for glassing the panels precutting all sorts of pieces. Turns out most stuff I cut what I thought was big ended up fitting real tight. Luckily the edges will be getting a dish on the bottom and the Top inch buried in the gunnel arrangement. Got up early this am and recruited Michelle as my helper. She made a pretty good mix maestra and helped with wetting out the glass. I weighed all my glass on an old kitchen scale beforehand, and figured out the exact resin needed converted to grams from lbs and ounces. Next, I used my formula to figure out the ratio of hardener to resin...as it mixes 2:1 by volume, but 2:.9 by weight. To make things easy on Michelle, I pre weighed out 200 gram resin batches, and she added 90 gm hardener. For each layer, there was one batch over and one under respectively which were derived from the remaining resin needed to wet out the glass for the given weight. I got all the batches ready to mix in cups, then I mixed a 290gm batch of slurry thickened lightly with glass bubbles and silica. I rolled this on the bare corecell as a bottom layer, then Michelle and I layered out the 45 degree pieces and pulled the bias on the cloth till it was where we wanted it. Next we started mixing the batches and wetting out the cloth with rubber squeegees. She was starving the layup a bit but I came thru with the roller and topped everything off. Next we pulled the 90 degrees layer and seated it on the panel. Again, barely making it, we tugged on the bias a little to lengthen it to size, then wet out with the foam roller. We topped it with precut peel ply the was definatly big, as intended, then layered 2 layers of blue shop towels as breather, topped with a quilt batting tunnel down the bag to ensure I had adequate airflow. The bag was a little tight on the top side by the valve but some packing tape and butyl sealed it up good. Found a few leaks and had Michelle on the roller rolling while I seated the bag. Pulled vacuum and set the controller to pull around 14" hg, the bag was leaking around the top and the resin trap was leaking, almost no chance of pulling resin in, I may just ditch it. I put the fitting off the side under two layers of bubble wrap with batting in between. Looks good. Pump was cycling a bunch in the beginning, got everything sealed up and it was coming on every 5 min or so for 15-20 sec. Good enough for me...I'm gonna try and find a stethoscope to search out leaks better, for now this is fine, the pump will run when it needs to. Got the heat goin out there, should be good. Gonna buy a few dollar store tarps and make a big tunnel tent as a hot box for curing these guys.. More building tommorow hopefully
Chris