Step 45: Making Divinycell H80 Foam Core Panels & Peel Ply, Our Tips & Tricks without vacuum bagging

[Music] today we're kind of going to show you how we do our foam core panels um there are different ways and obviously you know check with the pros but uh this is kind of how we do it and we figured it's a good opportunity to show you cassie can record everything um i'm gonna try to just do this little panel by myself this is a floor panel for the front of our 25-foot cat this goes in the birth area and yeah it's just a nice small panel it shouldn't take about two quarts of resin on figuring and uh yeah we'll kind of give you a quick go down how we do it why are we doing this why are we doing what why are we doing a how-to not really how to more just like how we how we do i don't want it to be an educational thing use it you know take a grain of salt definitely consult the pros when we were doing the research for our boat and wanted to use the foam core we couldn't find very little material especially on youtube and stuff which we do a lot of research um on anybody doing a foam core um you know there are some people that do minimal foam core stuff but uh they don't really show like how they they reside and how they do everything so we're just gonna kind of run you through some quick uh tips and tricks that we've learned along the way that make our life a little bit easier and uh kind of show you guys it's not really that hard uh it's just a little time consuming if anything all right so we're going to use we're using total bolt we've used total both for our whole project so far they've been phenomenal uh helpful customer service all that um check them out if you guys do order anything use code dauntless on totalboat.com you get 15 off your first time use um yeah so we're using uh two to one epoxy resin uh we're using a slow hardener today uh just give us a little bit more open working time our temperature right now is right around 60 degrees so we're just on a limit of the slow hardener but well we should be fine i can kick the heaters on once we're done just don't warm it up a little bit more and you're doing how many ounces um right now i'm gonna do about 750 milliliters for the first one we're gonna see how far it goes i'm just gonna judge it for the second on how much more we need and we're also doing one layer of 17 ounce and one layer of 12 ounces and then putting peel ply on top peel play on top all right so once we get mixed here we have limited time i mean you probably have about uh i don't know half hour 45 minutes to to do all your working before it starts to gel up once it starts to gel up you really don't want to be messing with it because you can introduce even more air bubbles so we're going 500 milliliters of the resin and 250 milliliters of the hardener this is gonna be just enough good to the last drop all right what i did is i uh i just bent up uh a welding rod into a little mixer here so we can easily mix with the drill all right and just keep it on low speed things not to do things not to do don't let the cop go when you mix it with the drill the time lapse caught it well i hope the time-lapse quarter something caught it this is the aftermath now you're going to wipe up your mask because you know oh my gosh sticky and horrible all right so what i do is i just we pre-wet the foam first and usually doesn't take too much hair just enough to kind of saturate the foam we do want to get it out of that cup kind of as fast as we can because the mass of the cup will heat up uh faster and help it cure faster and we really don't want it to cure faster we want time to work so so we basically just do this and we do our best not to make a mess over the edges because we will have to clean it up later when we do the back side of this all right and we found spatulas work best spatulas work best yeah some people use rollers um definitely try out you know whatever you whatever you're feeling really um for us it seems to be the spatula thing and just make sure we get over the edge here i try to leave it a little bit thick on the bottom coat and uh the reasoning behind it is when you're doing the fiberglass especially the 17 ounces it seems to be hard to saturate sometimes and if it's sucking off resin from underneath it makes it that much easier to saturate the top layer you know the the layer five or less so all right so any extra hair i'm just gonna kind of smear it out evenly across the whole thing my nice technique back and forth and again i'm making a mess i'll clean up the bottom side later all right so is that the 12. this is the 17th so 17 first yep and this is extra big and perfect i couldn't have done a bit of dough good job all right so what i like to do is once we get the glass down i give it a quick roll just to push any air bubbles out um really it helps it stick down better makes a little bit easier when we're trying to do the next layers up you can use a spatula here too yeah spatula's worth too i just had this handy so [Music] that's pretty much it on that take the rest of this and just dump it out all right and if you scrape your cups i totally put that in typically if i try to scrape the cup out quick because you get quite a bit more out of the cup if you let it dry sometimes you can peel it out of the cups but we've found it's more of a hassle than it's actually worth try to peel the resin out of the dried resin out of the cups and reuse the cups and honestly the only cups that we could do that with was the total vote coverage yeah the james telling cops yeah all the rest of the cops ended up cracking once you try and the biggest thing on the second on the once you get the glass down i find if you just get it covered in resin um don't worry so much about air pockets or anything like that spread it out the best you can and just let it soak in for a minute and you'll see it'll all turn color um while it does that i'm going to mix up my next batch 400 milliliters of this that'll give me 600 milliliters total i think that'll be enough so that's already pretty much saturated yeah it is and resin definitely is a sticky mess so do your best to keep everything clean um as you're going because in the long run it's just easier to keep it clean yes it is again we've learned from several mistakes many gallons of resin i want to say we're probably going through jesus we shouldn't even say we should have people guess and then figure it out ah there you go watch our videos give it a good guess on how many gallons of resin we go through in a few weeks i'll add up all the receipts and see how much i've ordered i don't need much on the rest of this just on the edge here and here good maybe touch more here okay again i'm just going to spread this all out and then i'll give it a quick roll before i put the next layer down and again the next layer will saturate from underneath just like this make sure you get all the way to the edge now i cut all my panels two inches larger than we actually need and that just kind of gives us a little bit of leeway one if my measurements were wrong to start with uh i have room to adjust but the biggest thing is when we're doing the resining uh the fiberglassing here um it gives us a little bit of leeway if the edge should pull up a little bit i have two inches to cut off on the final cut so it kind of really helps out quite a bit to yes we're wasting but it helps out yeah a little bit make adjustments is easy to do so exactly yeah so this is all wet so now i'm just going to take my my fin roller here uh i you the little ones seem to work better for us it's tougher on large surfaces but um so we're just gonna roll it out and uh we're looking for any air bubbles i'll see if i can find that to kind of show you on camera here see this big air bubble right there so you're gonna push that all the way to the edge until it pops off the edge that's it and you go all the way down the panel i'm going to move kind of quick now because i start to get another layer down um this is just a preliminary and we will do this again once we get the final layer on here and peel pie but it helps to push the bubbles out from what we've seen on every layer and again it's just this is just a quickie so i got that pretty much rolled out now i'm going to grab the second wire here as another cub and again i just want to move as fast as i can just to get everything down and then afterwards we'll deal with any nice for all i know i got good at this kind of sad all right same thing i'm just going to spread it out i'm going to knock out any major air bubbles before i put my resin on and again it takes an extra a minute or so but it saves time all right so that's done and i'm just gonna dump the rest of my resin out and this should be enough to saturate everything i'm just gonna leave my cup upside down right here for now and spread this out and this will also again saturate from underneath because i left it off down there just kind of work back and forth all the way down this is almost perfect scrape the cup always scrape the cup to get a little bit more and with the drill it's all fully mixed it's not just like resin or hardener that is creepy now it's mixed they do sell a uh silicone mixers for paint um it might be worth looking into one of those we don't use one personally only because we just never really bought one and again any any like white spots i'm seeing i'm just filling in like right here i think okay i see like excess right here if you want to scrape over to this way there you go perfect two fourths oh no what did you do one quart and uh one and a half quarts on this one this is a small sheet too so what i'm i can pull out a lot of the bubbles you can see them here with just the spatula it's going to put a little bit of pressure there behind it and just pull them and you'll see it come out i'll still hit this with the uh okay looks good i'm done with this now i'm just going to knock off the excess resin and i'll wash them later with acetone everything gets cleaned with acetone i'm just going to give a quick roll and then i'll get the peel ply down and uh that's another thing there's not a lot of videos out there about uh people are hit or miss on pure fly uh basically i could leave this just like it is roll out all the bubbles and be done with it and fill it later um you still have this weave surface here um yeah if you get a close-up so you can see the texture in it yeah and you can fill that later on when you do the fairing it'll fill um the peel ply you've had hit or miss situation sometimes it works great and you can get it down nice and neat and no no bubbles nothing other times it wrinkles up a little bit and you still have to do the fairing part on sections but it's still a lot better than it is originally um so let me say take it or leave it we have it so we're using it yeah we have i bought a full roll when we started the boat so it's you know at this point we're going to use it all just to use it up and the best bet is just kind of drape it down like a sheet bigger panels usually catch they'll grab a side and i'll grab a side and we'll work it like that and as it gets stuck so you stick it down in the middle and as you go you can just gently tug on this and it'll pull those wrinkles right out right yep i'll do it from this way right here yeah and it'll pull those wrinkles out uh definitely get it stuck a little bit before you start doing that because it'll just slide slide every time you tug on it so you'll see it just real quick hitting up the roller to push it down and the peel part should basically be saturated just like the fiberglass as far as i'm concerned some people say you should actually put another coat of resin on top of peel ply i personally haven't found the need to again if you follow a manufacturer's recommendations they say to do that so we do if we have excess resin in the cup left over exactly yeah if we have a little excess resin if you see any dry spots we'll definitely saturate it but we basically treat it just like fiberglass where we saturate everything we can as long as it looks saturated and wet but we're happy with it and we fully intend to fear all this out anyway afterwards let's just stop in the middle and apply a little extra pressure here and just stop pulling any bubbles out i said the main thing i focus on is always getting it down first getting it flat and saturated and then i'll deal with the bubbles after so you can see the bubbles clear as they there right and again you just work it all over the edge make sure you always go back because sometimes the bubble rolls off the side of the roller as you push it so just make sure you you go back and you hit all the way around and usually we have plenty of time to do this so we're using a slow harder we put partner on the uh resin so we probably have half an hour to work here 45 minutes let's say 45 minutes are probably a good question too if you have a larger panel we usually set a timer from the minute we start mixing resin uh we'll we'll start timers and we'll kind of follow it so we know like we're getting close on time like really pick up the pace or if you're ahead of the game you can start slowing down taking a little bit easier yeah i always try to go a couple different directions if i can just to make sure and again if you can get it without wrinkles and stuff in the end it's going to give you a better finish when you pull the peel fly off and it does kind of suck that the peel ply is literally disposable um you're done yeah you pull it off and it's it's junk um and it's expensive for what it is for what it is uh obviously if you buy quantity if you buy a full roll it'll probably be a little bit cheaper than buying by the yard and we noticed that uh because the foam is so porous that bubbles do develop over time that weren't there five seconds ago yeah so in a few minutes you might see bubbles pop up and i'll probably go over this again again rolling in between every layer if you have the time really does kind of help quite a bit when it comes to this part because a lot of the bulbs already gone so and again you can just gently i'm not like pushing down i'm basically just rubbing my hands against the top and it pulls the wrinkles right out of that peel ply for you sorry didn't do this end yet usually cassie helps me on all of our panels um fiberglass it's easier with two people um this kind of shows it i mean this panel here it can easily be done one person um it's a small panel it's a small panel you still are fighting the clock and the extra set of hands is nice you know yeah how you feeling under the gun huh under pressure how you feeling yeah the camera's on um no at least i'm fine right now i i think we're only in it like 20 minutes or so give or take i would say more this video alone right now is at 12 54. yeah and i stopped it like four or five times so well again at this point the glassing is done at this point um i'll mess with these air bubbles for a little while uh just because i have time still um obviously definitely look at the the charts for the temperatures on curing times and all that i will fire up our heater here once i'm done rolling it out and i'm all happy with everything we'll fire up the heater let it go for a few hours make sure it's nice and warm and then we should be good for the night after that it's actually 65 in here already yeah it's a it's a beautiful day today i'm just i'm more worried about tonight overnight that temperature might drop down a little bit yeah if we get it warmer we'll say warmer longer in here without having a lot of fuel i try to think anything else i need to say about the whole process uh that's pretty much everything that we've done so far uh everything we've kind of figured out along the way it's fun because we have actually forgotten along the way because before we were doing like the bigger panels and we would do them one way and then we stopped fiberglassing for a while yeah and then we started fiberglassing again in the winter indoors and we like forgot what to do kind of and we forgot that we were rolling in between every layer yeah and it made a huge difference and it makes a huge difference so like i'm still pulling air bubbles out of this i don't know if it shows on camera i'm pulling the wrong way but i would say you'll get air bubbles for a while and i don't know if it's because the foam's porous if we're actually introducing them ourselves but usually you hit a point and we're like all right we're satisfied with the result and then you keep going a little bit longer because you're not really we say we finished him you know so again i always leave everything extra big the foam is two inches big the fiberglass is two inches larger than that that gives you plenty of room especially when you're under the gun to you know if you're off a little bit it doesn't matter as long as you hit the edge so okay so that is our way yeah that's our method of uh fiberglass and phone core uh you guys have any comments or concerns or questions i mean feel free to ask in the comments below we try to respond to every single one you know everyone we don't have a lot of followers right now be sure to like share and subscribe it does help us out um but yeah if you have comments questions feel free to ask we'll answer them the best we can um obviously some stuff the manufacturer is going to tell you differently than how we do it and by all means follow their recommendations because if something goes wrong you can't say oh i did it like this they're not going to help you so you have any other comments on any of this like any other stuff that i'm i'm forgetting here i'm trying to think i think you did a pretty good job covering i tried to explain everything tomorrow you can help me glass and again see this stuff i might have just introduced these it's hard to sometimes it's hard to like again well it's a stop but you want to make sure you get all the air bubbles so you keep going and it's like oh i might have just introduced that air bubble you know and we are going through two layers of glass head so it's a little bit harder to get any bubbles out but again i'm still pushing bubbles out of the head i just wanted to use my new camera good good timing camera well usually my hands are built yeah we totally bought that camera though so you could use it for the boat build and stuff yeah and it's like every time we go to record someone's like more resin so overall the finish should be kind of a nice satin finish and that's what we look for when we do our uh when we finish our peel ply i'm happy with everything we're not pulling anymore big air bubbles out of it so to me that tells us we're in pretty good shape here and uh yeah that's about it time to clean up um wash everything down with acetone all your handles make sure you wash your drills because it will build up over time and destroy triggers and you know stuff like that i don't know what you're talking about yeah all right calling it i'll show an end result at a different date and result in a different date yeah is that an easter egg a little easter egg for the next one of this boat probably will never be otherwise in this boat oh no i mean you know what easter egg means what videos yeah it's like a hidden thing yeah right but it gets for the other owners too right no oh

Channel: Building MV Dauntless

Views: 76,875

Keywords: boat, boat building, catamaran, power catamaran, power cat, gothic arch, makers, total boat, rhode island, rhode island boat building, boats, building a catamaran, spirited designs, mv dauntless, fiberglass, fiber glass, jamestown distributors, women who make, woman boat builder, building a boat, diy, motor vessel, build a boat, foam core, divynicell, resin, totalboat, building, powercat, how to build a catamaran, fiberlassing, fiber glassing, fibre glass, howto, peel ply, how to

Id: _G7cPEENEdM

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021