The plan was to start earlier today but sleeping in got the better of me again. The first thing I did today was to check to see if the results of yesterdays work was as good as the cove I did where I sanded it smooth before applying tape. This is the benchmark cove. If I cant get my coves to look as good as that when applying the cove wet on green then I will revert to sanding them first. More work but I want a boat that looks as good as it can be.

Well these coves looked fine. Still a little bump here and there but with more practice I am sure they will look even better. And I also think more time for the cove to harden will also result in a much smoother finish.

More importantly I guess from a structural point of view (which is the most important) is that the glass is correctly bedded to the cove and uniform and smooth which will result in the best load spreading characteristic.

So I managed to tape the back of bulkhead 3 and the front of bulkhead 4. The rest of the coving will require the removal of the temp bulkheads so that I can have a continuous cove along the panel joins. I like to cove these before I cove the bulkheads so that the bulkhead coves are over the top. I find this neater. So I only have the 3 sections between bulkheads 4 and 5, 5 and 6, 6 and 7 to go.

I also finally got the wall mounted West pump working properly today and it is much easier to use than the plastic pumps on the drums. One pump up of the handle and you get the correct 5:1 mix into your mixing container. You don’t have to remember how many pumps you have done (if you are making a reasonable amount of resin using the drums you might pump say 5 of each or 10 of each but you would pump 10 from one drum then 10 from the other but must keep accurate count). With the wall pump you can make as many pumps as you need and stop anytime and you already have the correct mix.

The problems I had getting it working was that I used a hose into the 200 litre drum of resin that was too weak and it would suck in on itself when I pumped, closing off the flow. I bought some heavy duty hose (washing machine hose actually) and that solved the problem. The other problem was that the hardener pump didn’t seem to be sucking. In fact it doesn’t suck. It relies on gravity to feed the reservoir and the pump action then pushes the hardener out of the outlet (the resin hose does suck but it has to lift resin from the bottom of a 200lt drum). I mounted the hardener drum (its only 20 litres) over the pump and that solved the problem. The only thing I have to do now is to mount the pump in a more solid and convenient place (it is currently screwed to a heavy piece of timber but the timber is not attached to anything) but because the resin drums are full I cant move them yet (they are on a pallet) so until I make the second hull and use up all of the panels along the wall that are in the way I will persevere with the pump where it is.

So all in all a good weekends work. Nice to get something done. It has been a while. I am almost ready (mentally) to finish sanding the bog (I am about 1/4 done). Once I have finished the coving and there is nothing more to be done to the hull except fair it, I will have no choice but to do it. And then once it is done and the hull is turned, I do it all again.