Cabin Side Walls

The ratchet straps and screws holding the roof down had to be backed off one last time to allow the glue to be piped along the top edge of the side walls. We had to work quickly within the 10-15 minute window we had before the epoxy glue went off.

Once the roof was repositioned tightly down on the wall, and the glue over-runs cleaned up, I wet out and passed glass tapes to Tom for applying to the outside join.

The following day, with the outside tapes cured, we removed the holding screws and prepared the kerfed areas and materials for bonding a full sheet of 1000gm quadraxial glass. As the day was very hot with the temperature already over 36°C, we postponed this work until early the next morning. We opted instead to finish some other smaller strips of taping.

At 6.30am the next day, with the temperature around 21°C, we carried out our carefully choreographed process of mixing, spreading and pushing glue into the kerfs over a 1.5 square metre area on the port side; and then wetting out a pre-cut quadraxial glass sheet of the same size, and carefully lifting and positioning it on the wall. The quadraxial was beautiful to work with, as it held its shape well. Then Tom applied the peel-ply, whilst I took a break to clean up and then drive August to school. By the time I returned to the boat, and we hurriedly built a work platform for accessing the starboard wall, it was over 29°C and rising fast. But we decided to go for it, as the humidity was falling just as quickly.

Within a couple of hours the work had set hard. So we managed to also tape the top and bottom of the port side wall, and the top of the starboard side, before the temperature reached 37°C.