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Pinguino Keel Fiberglassed

Here is another step that I do out-of-order from the official Pygmy manual. I lay the heavy fiberglass tape on the keel now, before I fiberglass the entire hull. The manual says to do it afterwards. However it looks much cleaner if you do it beforehand. Structurally there shouldn't be too much difference either way.

In the future, if the keel ever needs to be re-taped, you just do what you would do otherwise... sand it a bit to rough it up and then lay down some more tape. No big deal.

On the ends you will have better luck if you cut a few tucks in the edges of the tape. See below. 


Try to make the tape as straight as you can. By putting it underneath the main fiberglassing it will be much less noticeable, but you'll still probably see it.



The excess was simply squeegeed onto the bare wood which is fine and pre-saturates those areas.

There is a huge debate on whether you should pre-saturate the panels or if you should just wet out the fiberglass cloth and have it soak through. I tend to lean toward just wetting it out. My thought is that pre-saturating simply adds weight, but that's only a hunch. A good thing though about pre-saturating is that the cloth slides around much easier when you're trying to smooth it on.

I will not pre-saturate the rest of the boat and will just wet out the cloth sufficiently. There will be no difference in appearance between the pre-saturated areas and the wetted out areas. It all blends together as long as the hull isn't exposed to too much sunlight or you don't wait too long between this step and the main fiberglassing. 


One edge of the tape has a thick sewn edging which when cured will need to be scraped or sanded down. You can sort of see it in the picture below.


Looking okay so far!


Next steps: I'll sand the tape edges, especially the thick edge, flush to the hull without cutting into the wood. After that it's time to fiberglass the entire hull!



Cheers!




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Comments

  1. AlTweedy20 November, 2020 10:21

    I'm at this stage after a 15 year pause in building my Osprey. Very helpful, thank you.

    ReplyDelete

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