How To Make Waterproof Plywood using Fiberglass and PVC!

now we're going to reach in there that works that works pretty good so what I've done I went ahead and tore some little pieces of material and it's kind of cut to size now one of the tricks with wrapping an end is you want to leave enough material for it to bend Welcome to our family's boat shop everyone my name is Joe buskins I'm a second generation US Coast Guard licensed professional boat builder and I hold a 100 t t captain's license which I use during the summer months to operate our 29 fft charter boat here in the background so you guys are back in the shop probably interested in this project piece that we've been working on now this is just a sample piece that we built in the shop to demonstrate how to fiberglass over plywood then we talked about different fiberglass selection materials and their application then we talked about gel coating this piece the last video in the series we actually drilled some holes through that material there and matter of fact um it's interesting I know some of you folks were curious about the thickness of the glass I measured that and that is right at one quar of an inch thick now for you folks overseas in the UK and Australia we're working on some Metric for you guys but that's pretty thick that's about that much glass but you can see that there is raw wood exposed and this demo piece is pretty typical of like a Stringer system or a transom or a structural bulkhead in Your Boat and Marine plywood it really opened a lot of debate up amongst you guys does it even have a place in boats or this kind of work anymore and I think it does but it has to be done correctly so what I want to show you guys today is we are going to be using some different materials and talking about different methods to install or route or run Hardware with marine plywood and do it in such a way that you're going to get the maximum life out of it okay guys so what I want to do is just talk about a few pros and cons now obviously the sample piece we have have is made out of marine plywood and this other piece of material is what we use to build our 29 F ft hybrid Bay that is the cusa and it is meant to be a replacement for marine plywood in most ways about equal in strength it's about 40% lighter um but it's considerably more expensive and there may be projects that it's not necessary so just want to clarify that never was saying that uh there's no place for composits or marine plywood is better than cous so you just want to find the right application and now as far as why would wood rot and you may be wondering why in the world do I have a can of pork and beans um and that's a good question the reason I have that is because I was trying to think of a way to illustrate why would rots and basically when you have wood it is an organic material just like pork and beans are and if the wood is in good condition and it is dry and then it is hermetically sealed in a really really good coat of fiberglass it's as if this can of pork and beans is sealed in there and this this can is good for like 2 2 and 1/2 years from right now so I could put this in my boat or put this in my truck and it's going to be perfectly fine even 2 years from now but if I take this drill and drill a hole through the top of that can of pork and beans and break that seal you would not want to come back even in a couple days and try to eat the contents of this can it would make you sick it would start to break down and basically that's what would as long as it is sealed very well away from moisture and away from oxygen what which is what the components the main components W needs to Decay if you seal it and keep it sealed you're going to minimize the rot so I know that's a lot of talking and maybe even a little more talking but that was the best way I could think of illustrating in this if you punched a hole in this you wouldn't want to eat it if you punch a hole in this wood and you don't seal it properly that's going to be an entry point for water and oxygen and a lot of factory boats the folks they come in here and they drill a big hole and then they go to routing routing hoses and what whatnot through there and in a short period of time you're going to get a lot of rot so the way our family has typically done this and you'll notice we've got some little short pieces of PVC that is your normal PVC pipe and we have actually taken you can either use a fairly aggressive disc like so or you can do it with a little piece of a 60 or 80 grit or you can use a dual action sander I actually use this dual action sander to put a texture on that surface matter of fact you can see we have knocked the Shine off of it what we're going to be doing we're going to be sealing this wood and installing these in such a manner so that that wood is going to be completely sealed on top of that I'm going to show you guys a few other little components that we're going to use that minimize the uh even ever having to drill a hole in the wood in the first place so what I'm going to do though first we got to make a little bit of dust we've already drilled these holes in a previous episode and I'm going to be using just a little high-speed grinder with a um that is a 36 grit matter of fact that that is what you're going to be looking at okay guys the first thing we're going to do is our little acetone trick on a shop towel and we are going to clean the surface a little bit even prior to sanding a little bit of acetone and everywhere where we're going to be sealing it I'm want to try to make sure we've got a good clean wax free surface just like so you can see that's even taking a little bit of the gel coat off same goes on the back side and clean everything really nice and thoroughly so we have done all of our Sandy and uh we're going to zoom in there a little bit and show you guys what that should look like um real thoroughly you can see they're on both sides and we've gone back quite quite a bit about a fingers length or so all the way around the perimeter now I know that probably looks like I removed a lot of material but we're probably just taking a fraction of an inch off but we gotten back down to good raw materials good raw fiberglass glass and you guys know I love this trick of just using the heat gun and after we sanded that and blew off and vacuumed I'm going to warm up the surface a bit we want to be sure that you get a premium Bond and remember moisture along with oxygen is what causes rot in wood so we're trying to eliminate those things so what we've done is I have poured up a little bit of resin just just uh probably an/ an inch or so and we are going to use we're using some red Catalyst now this is the same as the MEK 925 that we use throughout most of our other videos but what we've done is we've added a uh a red dye additive that goes with and what that does is it allows me to see a little better especially with the resin when it is thorough L mixed and the mix is very important now again if you're new to the channel maybe this is the first time you've seen this but we've got a lot of other videos showing how to mix resin and we talk about Catalyst percentages which generally it's 1 to 2% with most polyester resins which that is what this is this is not epoxy but it would work for a vinylester as well so generally 1 to 2% and you can see how that red Dy distinctly changed the color of that now we do have some fans flowing behind us generally I'm wearing a good respirator all the time when you're dealing with this stuff yes I know it is toxic we're doing these little demonstrations for you guys with YouTube though and the amount of time we're spending doing these little demonstrations is Tiny compared to the time we spend when we're building one of these big boats but we're going to mix that very very thoroughly and we're going to probably spend a minute or two now is a good time to ask you folks though we want to do more of this kind of content and we can't do it without y'all support so first off I want to thank everyone the channel has had really rapid growth recently and it's all because of you guys but we want to be able to do more of this kind of stuff and it takes a lot of time and effort for us to do these demonstrations if you guys haven't already hit that subscribe button now's a good time to subscribe like comment share that allows us to do more of this kind of stuff and on the subject of comments if you want to see something that we haven't done yet feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to try to answer questions for you guys so we've got that resin thoroughly mixed and I would say that is plenty good enough what we're going to do at this point we're going to use West systems makes these little small they're more or less disposable brushes they work fine with epoxy now I generally like to clear the brush a few times inevitably there's always going to be a few loose hairs and whatnot and now remember our illustration of the can if you punch a hole in this can you would not want to eat the pork and beans and that's what we've done essentially we've punctured a hole through that wood and now we need to seal it and that is going to be the job of the resin now we're going to reach in there and you can see that's going to really soak it up cuz this is in Grain and you guys stick with me there I know our videos can typically be pretty long and we're trying really hard to actually show you guys like real deal boat builder grade stuff like I'm not experimenting here this is how our family's done it for years and I know this will work but it is important to follow the steps now obviously this is just a sample a sample piece and probably when you're working in a boat you know getting it upside down is going to be a little bit trickier but it's it's totally doable but I was talking to one of my friends this morning about fiberglass and doing this if any of you guys like to bake out there there's cooking like with a soup or a stew where you can kind of wing it and throw a little bit of this in there and throw a little bit of that in there but then there is baking and with baking your measurements need to be pretty precise and you need to follow a sequence or else the results may not be what you want and that's the way this is I know sometimes the tendency is to skip around and maybe not watch the whole video but I'm going to fill this with all the particulars throughout so it's super important not to skip around or fast forward because there may be an important step and I really really want you folks out there to get the best result and you can see where I'm going with this though we are just very carefully very meticulously now this is going to be the same idea as when we fiberglass this piece originally this is what I call a primer coat now I have had a few comments maybe a little confusion some folks ask when I'm going to apply the primer well the res is the primer so it's not a specific different material or primer per se but we are using this prior to installing the part to Prime the wood or seal the wood now one thing you can do as well when you have a hole that's drilled such as this is sometimes once I have coated it what I've done is I've double double gloved so that way we make make sure we don't get any hairs and you can actually just take your finger and work that especially the overhead part sometimes it makes moving that material around a little easier now as far as the ends go we had a few more questions again a little bit of confusion and you guys can see what we've done while I was sanding this was the original kind of a sharp corner there while we were sanding this I also sanded that but can you guys see the difference there we put a really nice radius now honestly most of the time if we were building a part like this like if this was actually in a boat that was being built or you were rebuilding your say an older boat that originally had plywood stringers might be a good application to go back with plywood stringers a lot a lot of times a Stringer like this would abut into like a wall if you will it would terminate and we would just fiberglass from one wall to the other and we would be sealing the ingrain rarely would we see a Stringer or a piece just kind of terminate like that but I want to kind of also demonstrate while we're doing this for everyone what we would do in that case now again A lot of times we like to warm up the wood a little bit with a heat gun we do have a little bit of rain falling tonight and again moisture is not your friend when it comes to sealing plywood now I'm going to give this a moment just to start cooling interesting things happen when you warm up a material like wood you dry it out but then as it starts to cool there's like a capillary action that'll actually help draw that resin and I keep going back to this most Factory built boats they don't take the time to Prime the resin they don't take the time to dry they don't take the time to Prime the wood rather with resin and I think that is one of the most critical steps that is routinely missed so the same the ingrain always really draws up a lot of that resin and that is what you want you want to just give it all the resin that it'll take really work it in there and it's quite all right if some of that resin gets out on the fibers as well remember we are trying to seal that wood completely from the El elements no wood needs to be in contact with water or air for that matter okay very good and it is all right as long as you have resin to keep coming back in there and brush out a little bit more this is actually already starting to thicken up now when you have resin in a cup like this folks if you're new to this and it's really happening with epoxy resin in a thin coat will stay liquid longer than resin in a mass and when you have a cup of resin like this if you don't stir it around and keep it moving you're going to get what's called an exothermic reaction or Flash over or boil over and it'll actually smoke and get really hot you don't want that if that happens in a mixing cup like this you want to remove it from your building you do not want to breathe the vapor and um just be mindful of that so that happens sometimes but if you're careful if you're mindful there you go and that looks that looks quite good we have made it to the next day and our primer coat which again all that is is going to be the resin that we're using for the project which is a isopathic but it's a polyester there's a orthophthalic which is kind of a common Gray isophthalic generally a little bit higher caliber but what we we had used is we just did one coat and I came back this morning and just very lightly sanded some of the little Burrs in there and kind of softened some of these Corners Just a Touch now if you want to go an extra step there's no reason why you couldn't go ahead and put two coats of resin as a primer and we would just duplicate the same process basically go in there and put another coat on now you may have noticed there's another little little small hole right there here in the US that's that would be what we call a/ inch um standard outboard motor size bolt and we went ahead and we drilled a hole last night but I did not resin coat it but you can use these little brushes that we Source from U these are the West system West system small brushes and you could certainly have done the same thing like last night if you had outboard motor holes through a transom you can load this with resin you can get that in there and you can work the resin all throughout the interior but what you have to do is when you drill those holes you have to be sure they're wallowed out a little bit or just a little bit bigger so that it factors in the thickness of the resin you're adding so we have made some good progress that is cured that looks ready for installation but sometimes when you're drilling holes for example this one you can see the tolerances are quite tight those are acceptable this one you may not have the right Hool saw for the size pipe you have and there is some wiggle room right there so I'm going to show you guys how we're going to move beyond the priming step into bonding these into your Stringer or bulkhead and we're going to be going back and we're going to be using some of the the Napa pro strand this is a again a polyester putty but it's got short strand fiberglass fillers in it that make it stronger um I've used it with a lot of success for a number of years it's considerably stronger than like your Bondo or your lightweight body fillers this is more of a structural filler and something you run into like here in the shop occasionally you'll have some of this material and it'll thicken up a little over time you can take a standard polyester resin as long as this filler is a polyester base which this is and you can actually add some resin and thin it out a little bit you can stir that resin in and that will help make either a a thinner creamier mixture there or sometimes it'll kind of help what I call like bring bring back to life some older putty anybody's ever worked with enough boat stuff knows that occasionally you open up the can it's still good but it's stiffened up a little bit so that's one of those little tricks you can use you want to be sure to mix that in Thoroughly and uh it will still catalyze with your same your standard like a you know a BP a Bo type paste material um that again is the Martin senior paints um which is the same stuff again your local Napa there are probably some other companies that make something similar um 3M makes a vinyl Lester high strength Marine filler that is very good but um it's about 300 bucks a gallon these days this is about a hundred bucks a gallon so big big big difference so we're going to go ahead and get us a little a little dollop on there on our mixing board and that probably is going to be fine what we're going to do I'm going to address there's a way you can actually go back in there and build build up a bit if you will and as a general rule of thumb like today it is fairly mild for us you can see we're in uh kind of like what you expect Springtime temps over although we are not in springtime right now but it's fairly mild I'm going to go just one run across the top sometimes you will get a little bit of that liquid that just kind of happens that's pretty normal what we're going to do is turn that and mix it very very thoroughly pretty much standard for any kind of body filler you're going to use whether it be polyester or vinylester you can see see there's little swirls of catalyst in there you do not want that you want a really nice uniform I like to pick it up turn it over kind of run it out pick it up again chop your way back through it just always has worked for me that way when you pick it up that way you know there's no unmixed material that laying on the bottom now honestly Sometimes the best way to get this material in there just with your pointer finger there and for this instance we are going to double double up sometimes you can do this you can put a second glove on when you're work in an area that you're likely to tear a glove sometimes on those edges can be can be sharp now I suppose you could use a little putty blade or something else but honestly that works that works pretty good we're going to reach in there and just thoroughly coat you want it completely coated this is actually going to add more of a barrier for our pipe that goes through so we've got our primer coat of resin we've got a code of the putty and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take our PVC insert and put a nice fat bead of that around kind of approximating where it's going to be going through the Stringer get a bit of a coat on there now it can be a little messy doing this but guys we've done it this way for years working with our boats and we've had a lot of success this way but you got to you got to move right along you can't you can't be goofing around there we go and we're going to get get that about equal and I would say don't worry about it being perfect on the first pass we're actually going to come back and add some additional material but I'm going to bring my little squeegee blade tool that in there and again it is a little tricky to get this perfect on the first pass I wouldn't expect to sometimes sometimes you do sometimes you can but you can see that I am using this blade to kind of force that material in there just like so yes pretty nice just like that we got it nice and symmetrical now sometimes you can actually Mark with some magic marker or something but obviously what we're doing I'm just calling that eyeballing that if you will I'm just kind of looking and it's good enough now generally I like about one inch or so that's a little bit wider little bit wider than my fingertip protruding out on either side sometimes you may have a piece of it sticking out through one side and this may actually run to another bulkhead or a petition in your Stringer system and you may use that as a conduit for running wire say up to the bowel on our 29 here we used pipe such as this to run our trolling motor wires up to the bow um really good for that kind of stuff and the same deal now this would would be a little small for a rigging tube but the same deal on this boat we used two 4 in pieces of pipe that came out from under the console and back into the build area now you got to kind of know when to stop sometimes as you're tooling this stuff you're like okay it looks it looks good that is actually firming up already I hope y'all can see so we've got the first one stuck in and that has firmed up and we are prepping to do the second one now the tolerances are a little bit tighter on this one so I'm going to go with a little less material on that initial wipe but I want to emphasize again yesterday when we were talking about this we took the PVC pipe and we cleaned it thoroughly first with some acetone and removed all the the numbers and any potential residue and then you're going to want to put a very aggressive texture on that now you can again use a DA or you can do it by hand but that is a critical step for good at adhesion clean PVC pipe and a really good aggressive texture on the surface same deal here about one line across is usually going to be adequate of course I know you guys have seen me do this a bunch of times I know for some of you folks that have been watching the channel for a while I may repeat myself or maybe even say stuff sometimes that seems kind of obvious or I've already talked about but we have really been seeing a lot of new folks visiting the channel and again I want to thank you guys so much I know there's a lot of ways you can be spending your time and uh the fact that you guys are here at the channel and learning and watching uh hopefully learning what we're doing and help you guys get more work done on your boat and do it in a way that you can feel very confident and comfortable with all right that looks good again we don't want any any strips of color color through there it should be nice and uniform same deal double gloved here so we don't have to worry about ripping through and uh really nice wipe down on the interior and again this acts as another layer of sealant to the wood we've been doing it this way for a long time that's how I did it when we built our 29 footer now we did use cusa board in the construction of my other boat but for a lot of folks cusa may be it's a great product but it does cost about twice to almost three times as much as Marine fur plywood and that is kind of our plywood of choice if you can get it anything outside of fur it's hard to know how it's going to behave for you guys I've had some comments on fur and that it's not any good for boat building but that is just incorrect it's just just plain and simple wrong I hate to tell you we've been doing it for years good Marine fur plywood it holds fiberglass very well maybe better than most other plywoods and the price is not astronomical and it's pretty readily available okay so you'll notice we kind of held back a little bit we kind of buttered it in the middle and then just a real easy placement now this one is a little tigh I'm going to kind of work now this is kind of a specialty tool I think they'll call that a modeling clay um basically like a ball bearing on the end of a rod now what I've done we went ahead and put some extra material in there just using a gloved hand but you can use a little device like that to come in there and Tool if you're building something that has got to be exact like a a mold for example where you've got the side meeting say the a bottom flange and you want to Tool the material and you got a very long run and you want to be perfect that's a specialty tool I'm sure you could probably get it somewhere from like Minicraft or some of the big composite uh distributor parts Distributors there's also little tools West system distributes these little U radius mixing mixing U paddles but you can see these come in different sizes so if you have a LW large or small but honestly for something like this it is noncritical and one thing that happens when you use those little those tools is sometimes it will leave a ridge of material that you don't really want you want everything to kind of blend and you want just a nice smooth radius again if you've been watching the channel you know I'll use the reference of just a grown man's kind of your finger fingertip I know for a fact that the fiberglass will bend around that r radius comfortably yeah we'll get a closeup in there that is about what it should look like and again a lot of you folks are brand new to boat work or fiberglass I I'm not I've been doing it my entire life my dad was a US Coast Guard licensed professional boat builder fam's built hundreds of boats and just really trying to show you guys some techniques now I get a lot of questions if can you do this or can you do that but we're really just trying to build some good foundational knowledge for you folks that are maybe new to doing this kind of work and um some of you guys have been doing a while you might pick up some little tricks and tips now we are in a well ventilated shop kind of want to talk about safety a little bit as well we're in a well ventilated shop typically we're wearing masks and respirators you always want to wear gloves sometimes tyvec suits eye protection um all of these chemicals potentially are bad for you over the long term sometimes com I don't wear a mask just because it's such a tiny period of time that we're working on these little sample pieces but when we're working on a big project I don't have to talk near as much we've worked together with our crew and everybody knows what to do and generally you just wear a mask the whole time for protection so I recommend that you folks do the same okay a few minutes of cure time matter of fact this one has already started to set and generally what we're going to do is just take some maybe some 80 to 60 grit paper and you can see there's going to be some little ridges or Burrs right there and we're just basically trying to knock knock the heavy stuff down that way when we get ready to Glass this you don't have any Burrs or high points and generally what I'm going to try to do is try to sand some of the excess material especially off the flange of PVC we're going to go around it like so now again you would be typically wearing a mask and if you do this relatively soon after you've applied the putty it will sand quite easy it's not going to be difficult now again guys our videos tend to be longer than a lot of videos but there's there a lot of steps to get this done right I feel like if you skip any one of these steps you could very likely compromise the job and trying to show you guys the way we've been doing it for a long time and that we know works if you deviate or change any of this I can't guarantee the results of course everybody's got different skill levels and whatnot too but we want you guys to have a lot of success in your repair jobs or your building projects and the main thing is just to take your time follow the steps be nice and meticulous look at that beautiful so what we've got here is a kind of a replication of what your standard outboard motor bolt or transom bolt you may be wondering why I'm even holding this well obviously this is one of the common holes that you're going to have through plywood super structure in a boat through the transom if you so choose to use it and sealing it properly is going to be a big deal I feel like that's where a lot of the problem with plywood marine plywood used in boats comes from so what we'll do though is we will look at the finished product we did finish sanding and kind of tooling those around we've got both sides done and generally that's going to be good enough I use 60 to 80 grit paper on that and we've got some little strips of mat here that we're going to be using to Glass that in a moment but I wanted to show yall this little trick first I feel like this is where a lot of people mess up as well and one of the tricks is just doing this neatly so I'm going to go ahead and run run this bolt in here and you guys can see obviously we've already got the backside taped off we're going to run that in there and you can see we've got a ton of little little pieces now if you've never done much masking or taping remember fact this is one of the secrets to doing a good job is your prep work beforehand and it is so much easier to tear a bunch of little pieces before you start and you guys will notice that I'm leaving a bit of a border around the perimeter of that bolt and we're just going round round round leaving a bit cuz what we want is when we put an adhesive in here you guys I'm sure y'all get the idea what we want is some squeeze out we want to put plenty of sealing in there whatever your seiling of choice may be and we want plenty of squeeze out but a lot of people are reluctant to put a lot of extra in there because again it it runs and drips and when you try to Tool it it looks nasty and messy but if you run tape around like that leave a bit of a border about 1/8 of an inch or so and then that way when you have squeeze out we can tool it now before we get into the glassing want to give you guys a little primer because again I know these videos are long but we're going to pack them full of lots of use information we're going to talk about some other options for mounting things these are weld Mount these are kind of your typical little looms that you would use in a boat for running wiring and whatnot soon as we get some glass on this thing I'm going to show you guys an alternate method and these are one of the coolest little uh gadgets I found in a long time so I went ahead and poured up a bit of resin there that's what we would call kind of your us a standard US court and that's probably oh not even 20% full I'm going to go with about four or five cc's of catalyst in that it is fairly cool right now around 70° or so for us so it's moderate temperatures we're going to mix that very very thoroughly again eye protection nose protection got plenty of air flow here in the shop and this is just for a brief amount of time I'm going to be doing this to demonstrate for you guys but uh we'll probably do a video soon I would imagine more about resin particulars I know there's been a lot of debate of polyester versus vinylester and especially epoxy now this sample piece I've built for you guys this is all made out of polyester polyester and vinylester are very very similar epoxy is kind of a whole different animal materials you can use some of them you can put epoxy over polyester but not vice versa also we got a lot of questions about using gel coat if you've done a repair job with epoxy and you try to put gel coat over it a lot of times it will result in a problem you may have in improper curing or weird characteristics now there are a lot of people that say they've used they've used it or can use it or that you can use it with no problem and that may be the case in some materials but I want to be sure to give you guys some good reliable information that is going to work when you guys try it again if you guys don't do a lot of fiberglass work you do not want to have problems now what we did there one of the things that people run into is if you leave a mass of resin in a container and it is sitting in a deep thick amount a lot of times it'll build heat within itself and it'll boil over and cause exotherm so we always like to put it in a pan and that way you can really keep the resin spread out we're going to go ahead and we're going to get a good base coat and you guys will hear me use the the phrase primer a lot you know a lot of times we're just using the same laminating resin that this piece has built out of but we're using it as a primer coat so it's not a specific primer material it is just using the resin now something else you can do obviously if this were an act ual part you would probably use some masking tape again to keep any drips or runs keep them minimized so what I've done I went ahead and tore some little pieces of material and what we've got obviously a straight edge on one side and we've got it feathered on the other we've got a base coat of resin on there and we are just going to take our time with this this is what we call dabbing believe overseas we've been having a lot of folks comment from Australia and the UK I think someone I heard commented that it was called stippling or stifling where they're from we're just going to continue to wrap that piece right around it's a delicate touch you get very and I'm going to remember where we stopped I'm actually going to leave a little bit un dabbed unfinished and then that helps me know where to pick up with our next piece so I'm going to get a little more resin and you can see we stopped there is a mental note going go ahead and start the second now obviously when you get underneath it that can be a little can be a little tricky but if you've planned out your work you want to have your pieces pre-or and everything ready ready to go before you start glassing so that you're not running around running around like a crazy man or woman I guess want to include everybody and you can see we're just continuing right around just like so now guys I have had a lot of practice in this department like I said my dad he was a he was a boat builder our family's been in the Boating and fishing business for multiple multiple Generations now and uh you learn a a lot you pick up a lot of little tricks and tips for sure now you can see we finished we stopped underneath that's going to be a little tricky for me to start there but it's it's possible it is totally possible to do just going to take our time now again this can be trickier if you're down in a if you're in a boat you you may want to wear a tyx suit so that you can actually just lay lay down on the floor if you will and we are just working our way light pressure little more resin now the resin is not where the real strength is in fiberglass the strength the real strength are in the glass fibers themselves and it's kind of interesting the the glass fibers by themselves not that strong the resin by itself kind of brittle but when you put the two together wow it makes an amazing material that once this sets up um it can do amazing things for sure now now a lot of times what we may do M fact I want to come over here and show you folks how I made those little strips so you can see we've got a straight edge there using another straight edge like this Plywood And I just carefully tore and yes it'll kind of come off you kind of have to work it or coax it all right so there would be one of our strips now the next strip you just would take your scissors and cut another straight edge on it so that is simple as that it's one of those little things sometimes you're like well how do you get those little thin strips they can be a little tricky to tear sometimes but that's how we do it now we've got our pipe thoroughly wrapped now generally in my opinion about three about three layers or so is going to be adequate now if you really want to double up on things is quite all right to come back in here and add some more material around the parameter just like so so what I'm going to do before we put the last piece on the bottom we will go ahead and again dab this it is very important to remember if you've never done this before fiberglassing it does not work well with a brush if you try to paint it back and forth you're going to have you're going to have problems you need to use a pushing motion a dabbing motion if you will and generally I would recommend after you wrap the pipe a few times two or three layers or around the outer parameter and that is one of the great things about tearing this material is All These Little Fibers kind of interlock with themselves and even though each piece is kind of small and maybe not super strong independently all these little pieces will enter interent loock and you're going to get a very well sealed now again as far as glass selection 1708 is going to be stronger than the CSM or you'll hear me refer to it as matte very often but matte tends to conform really well and again another point if you're using epoxy mat doesn't work very well and sometimes that can be a determining factor in what kind of resin you want to use if you want to be able to work with Matt see we're just going to roll got a little extra coming this other side we're just going to tie that right on over if you really want to work with Matt you can't use epoxy resin as your repair material or if you try to it's going to be very awkward the uh there's little adhesives within within the mat called binders that help it hold its shape and it's very interesting as soon as you wet as soon as you wet this mat you can see it gets it loses all of its strength and what's happening is the styrene that is in polyester and vinylester resins you can see how it kind of it's melting it if you will epoxy doesn't do that and it won't do that so if you try to lay this down the mat just doesn't want to conform now if you're using a by aial cloth which I'm going to swing right around that is now garbage if you're using a bi axial cloth um it does not it's sewn together it does not have binders made within it and you can use you can gladly use epoxy resin with a 178 by aial now bear in mind again this is a sample piece and I've had a lot of you folks ask if you can show how to finish the end and that is a good question you know it's kind of funny when we made this little sample piece I was just trying to demonstrate the basics of fiberglass for you guys but um I didn't realize it would raise some questions there so what we've got let see where did my scissors there are my scissors and I apologize this is how it is folks when you're working in a shop like this it's nice to have a table with everything set up but You' got to kind of move it along so what we did obviously I've got this piece of material pre wet here and it's kind of cut to size now one of the tricks with wrapping an end is you want to leave enough material for it to bend and we want it to overlap and you can see it's going to create we're going to need to take out a little what I call a pleat if you will so I'm going to take out and again this is for demonstration purposes we going to take out a little piece of material there and the same for the other side I'm just going to kind of approximately based on just laying it up there the one time now sometimes what you can do is you can lay it up there before you put any primer coat of resin on and it'll help you look at that isn't that neat okay so what we're going to do now you can do it one of two ways on this little piece here since it's small I am going to go ahead and this is another trick that you can sometimes use but you want to move fairly quickly cuz this little piece will start to get kind of soft on you but we're going to go ahead and pre wet that piece going position it and it is okay sometimes to use a combination of of your hands and a brush and this material will soften up if you just give it a few minutes it's amazing how it will conform and you could do it a little more accurately than that I'm sure like sometimes we will use a little a little Sharpie to Mark the pleat and you may want to do that you set it up here what we call a dry fit um basically before put any resin up here you go ahead and Stage all your pieces and have them ready um that that really improves your your workflow and it makes things a lot less hectic I think one of the other tricks or one of the other reasons our family has had a lot of success with using Marine plot would and fiberglassing it is we put a considerable amount of fiberglass on every project we do um we tend to probably overbuild things a little bit you're going to want more than just one thin coat so I'm going to tear a piece of mat here that one actually had a little drip in it and I don't want to use that I don't know what that is that may not be catalyzed it may not be good material so this is again one of the beautiful things about using CSM or chop strand mat is it works really good at smoothing so our 1708 very very strong there I've torn this little piece going to lay it up in place now we can kind of do the same deal but you got to work really fast with mat or else it'll go it'll go soft on you now sometimes you can do the same deal with the mat what we'll do is we will just tear tear the corner a little bit and that will take some of the stress out of the material if you will I'm going to roll it right around and the mat will really help blend really help blend those edges and make it look super nice and remember the hotter it is the faster you have to work and the lower the Catalyst percentage as a rule of thumb you guys will hear me say a lot of times 1 to 2% it's actually about one and A4 to one and a half is kind of optimal but if it's really cold you can go a little more Catalyst just take your time we're trying to work out the air bubbles and we are putting again a substantial amount of material to really seal this um a lot of the boats we built we were building commercial work boats and durability and toughness was a big one that happens sometimes that's the beauty of latex gloves now generally once we get a buildup like that I'm going to go ahead and shed them and get a fresh pair on there but man that's looking that's looking pretty good now I'm sure there's going to be some questions and comments trying really really hard to fill these videos up and answer a lot of questions but usually what I'm showing you guys is going to kind of be the recommended the recommended method now I've even had some questions about do we use our little our little grooved rollers do we clean them and yes we' just keep an acetone keep an old bucket with some acetone and we'll use it to clean our rollers and minimize waste and you can also use those to kind of help work out any Bubbles and they will kind of shape and smooth the fiberglass but you got to kind of know how much pressure to put and it's kind of one of those things that just takes a little just takes a little practice obviously you want the air out of there but depending on the application once this has been completely laminated and then sealed with some gel coat um it's going to be quite water resistant all right so we got that little end capped off there pretty nice now what I'm going to do folks um I may take just a little break here I don't know that we need to fiberglass all everything within the video I think you guys can kind of see the general process or I may jump back and do some more fiberglass I don't know but I also want to show you guys how we do the weld mounts and how we seal small screw hole so that you got a comprehensive idea of how to make your plywood in your boat last a long time for you guys the fiberglass has thoroughly cured it's been a couple hours or so since we applied several layers of CSM or mat we've capped this end and what we're going to do we're going to let that cure overnight and I think this video has run pretty long so what we're going to do I think we'll make it a two-part series and we'll talk about how to use the weld mounts and the little rigging grommets we'll pick this up right afterward we'll show you guys how we're going to seal these boat bolt holes and whatnot so uh y'all I genuinely appreciate everybody watching the channel it's been growing like crazy it's because of you guys means a ton to me but if you guys are enjoying the content and want to see me do more of it please remember to hit that subscribe button if you have not watch the videos like share comment all that good stuff that all helps me to be able to do more of this kind of work this Captain Joe here with Island Marine Charters fish bump TV my cameraman Logan there behind the GoPro and as always we will catch you guys next time [Music] [Music] out

Channel: Fish Bump TV

Views: 58,322

Keywords: boat works, fiberglass, fish bump tv, gelcoat. plywood. waterproof, catamaran, transom replacement, boats, fiberglass crack, sailing, fiberglass stress cracks, total boat, polyester, gulf shores al, how to fix chipped gelcoat, gelcoat repair, fiberglass resin, how to restore gelcoat on fiberglass boat, gelcoat, fixing boat damage, vinylester, boat maintenance, prepping fiberglass for gelcoat, spider cracks in gelcoat, sailing around the world, fiberglass repair

Id: gjB6NPIBZ7c

Length: 56min 50sec (3410 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024