First Outside Fiberglass Layers

First, a little more prep work.  Here you can see I laid some plastic on the floor to catch any epoxy drips that otherwise would have to be sanded off later.  You can also see I masked off the two quarter panels, although that may have been overkill.

After laying on the first layer of cloth, I was having a lot of problems with wrinkling where the cloth has to curve down on to the #2 panels.

The book says to tug gently on the corners, and when that didn't work I posted a question about it on the forum.  The answers were mostly a repeat of what the book said, but what I figured out is that I had to tug much, much harder than "gently."  It's starting to look a little better.

Here are the first two layers of cloth all laid out with very little to no rippling on the edges.

After laying down the first (wetting out) coat of epoxy I found that the ripples reappeared.  Most of them were easily smoothed out by more (hard) tugging on the corners.  In some cases I had to be sure and grab the lower layer of cloth because that turned out to be the one that was wrinkling and showing through on the top layer.  After all that I still ended up with some very minor ripples on the port side near the front.  After waiting a couple hours until the epoxy was starting to gel I was able to push them down with a plastic spatula. 

Here's a nice shot of the epoxied fiberglass from the rear of the shell.  There are some areas that sort of look like wrinkles, but that's just the wood grain.  Light is reflecting on the 'glass on the #2 panel that makes it look like it is not stuck down, but believe me, it is.  You may notice a bit of whitish area at the very top where the cloth is not adhering.  That is part of the ventilation opening that will be cut out and discarded, so no worries.  BTW, you can also see that the entire #2 panel has been covered with epoxy.  I found that impossible to avoid.  I have to sand down the edge of the fiberglass anyway, so I can give the panels a good scuff sanding at the same time.  I decided to do the top first and the sides later.  I'm glad I did--probably would have messed up all my nice smoothing trying to get the side layer on without someone to help, and how would I have done the re-tugging during epoxy application?  It would have been extremely hard.  Also I doubt if I could have smoothed out the remaining ripples after the fact. I'm going to try using push-pins through the previously epoxied layers to hold the side panels in place (even though the book says you can't).  If that doesn't work I'll have to use masking tape, but it is really hard to get off the cloth without distorting it and pulling out a bunch of threads.

Important Note to Builders:  I had forgotten the lesson I learned on the PocketShip, which was not to use the cheap blue nitrile gloves when epoxying a large area like this.  The roller handle is bound to get very sticky and start ripping off parts of your gloves.  In this case it ripped the entire palm of the right-hand glove off.  I got them both off as quickly as possible, cleaned my hands, and put on "Venom Steel" gloves.  They are heavy-duty black nitrile, 70% thicker than the blue gloves.  Please, unless you are somehow so fastidious that you don't get any epoxy on your tools, use these gloves when epoxying large areas.