At the beginning of the year I decided that I would try to add a couple of interesting Maker skills to my repertoire. My current one is fiberglassing. I’ve been working the past few weeks on a model ship build from scratch using just a few drawings and diagrams from the internet. I’ve got the hull built and covered in Bondo to get the shape I want. It looks great. Tonight I began the very scary step of taking my hull, which I’ve spent about 30 hours on, and covering it in a mass of messy, goopy, fiberglass resin and fabric. So far so good, though I’m a little uncertain how this is going to turn into anything but a Frankenstein looking hull. The fiberglass patches are sticking up over each other and the resin gooped up in the worst possible places. I sincerely hope that the reason it’s not drying is that it’s cool outside, and not that I didn’t put enough hardener into the resin (I think I did, but you never know…).
It’s stressful to subject something that you’ve labored over for hours to a potentially devastating and ruinous process. If the glass can’t be sanded smooth with the bumpy parts removed I am truly hosed. It’s probably a good thing that I began this project more to learn new skills (bondo and fiberglass) than to actually build a useful object.
If it works, the fiberglassing skills will come in handy during an upcoming prop build. I’m working with three groups for the show this year, and one of them has a very cool, very daunting, organic shape that will have to be built using glassing techniques. Pics will follow some time in March when it’s not all a secret.
In the mean time, I’ll post pics of the ship next time I remember to take the camera out into the shop.
*UPDATE* Well, it turned into a Frankenstein hull, with overlapping panels and huge globs of rock hard fiberglass resin. Hopefully I will be able to sand it down to perfect smoothness (I’m pretty confident of this). Lesson learned: don’t overlap the glass as much! I should have taken the time to cut one or two large pieces to lay over the hull instead of a bunch of smaller pieces, but I didn’t know how long the resin would take to harden and I didn’t want to be left with sections I hadn’t finished when it set up. It turns out the 65 degree temperature greatly extended the pot life of the resin. It was workable for 20 minutes or so. Plenty of time.
I’ll sand it all down later today and then see if I need a second coat, or if this one will be enough. One coat by itself added a fair amount of weight.
