Day 8 - Sanding and reinforcing the skirt

(Originally posted on July 14th, 2013)

Last night before bed, I mentioned that I had taken my Dremel tool and sawed off the excess skirt HDF.  This is what that looked like.

Today I got up, bought a belt sander, and flattened those rough panel tops and bottoms so that they were flush with the plywood.  I noticed that two of my wood screws (which I wound up using on all the panels after all) were outside the flush line, but the belt sander made sure they were sanded, too!  Hehehe? Hmm.

I then spent some time preparing to fiberglass the interior of the skirt.  I wanted the tape to not only protect from resin leakage, but I was hoping that it would hold the angle of the panels in place, but unfortunately it doesn't work too well for that.  I don't think I'm going to make specific angled wedges for the interior; rather, I'm just going to Bondo the heck out of the seams later.  Anyway.  Tape applied.

I then set to work reading and re-reading how to apply fiberglass to a substrate (in this case, the rough side of the HDF).  And one thing I noticed is that I hadn't purchased a surface curing agent when I bought the bond coat and catalyst.  According to TAP Plastic's website:

"Without surface curing agent (sometimes called "wax") polyester resins will not fully surface cure even though the surface may not seem tacky."

So unless someone reads this post and thinks otherwise, I think I'll hold off until tomorrow when I can get some curing agent to add to the final coat of resin for each reinforcing strip I'm going to slap down.

However, that didn't stop me from at least playing with my new, liquid-y toys:

• I prepped about 2 ounces of bond coat with about 20 drops of catalyst
• stirred it until the blue color turned clear (well, brown-clear)
• applied a fairly liberal amount to the rough side of some scrap HDF
• observed how much the HDF absorbs the resin, applied a bit more to make it nice and wet
• took a 3" x 3" length of 9.7oz fiberglass tape and slapped that onto the resin
• added more resin to the top of that
• rolled out the bubbles with the roller

Then, I set a timer for about an hour, and checked on it.  Looks pretty decent!  My first ever playthrough with this stuff.  Kinda fun!

But remember, kids, wear your safety equipment! Oh, and are you my mummy?

Tools:
1 - Black and Decker dragster belt sander: $49.97

Materials:
1- 10oz tube Liquid Nails: $2.52

Grand total: $52.49

Total to date: $556.36