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Building a marblehead hull from scratch, By Fredrik
Billig, Stockholm, Sweden
Part 3. Moulding the hull Back to the first page Time to mould the hull with epoxy, carbon fiber and glass cloth. Well i
did it twice actually. The first time i used to little epoxy in the outer
layer, wich gave a lot of small holes (pores) that had to be sealed. I
tried with various things but wasn't satisfied, so i did it again. This
time it's much better. This picture is actually from the first attempt. But you would se no difference on this picture. I bought the carbonfiber cloth from Sails etc since i didn't know of any swedish company selling carbon fiber cloth at a reasonable price. I do now (its on SRSS links page). The hull is moulded with one layer of 200gr carbon cloth and one outer layer of 100gr glass cloth. That layer will mainly be there to keep the carbon cloth in place while curing and make sure there are no pores in the carbon cloth that will make the hull leak. Well it will leak anyway if you do as i did the first time :-/. The outer glass layer will almost entirely be sanded away and the end result will look loke pure carbon fibre (finished of with floor varnish offcourse :).
The order of work when moulding is something like
this: Here is the boat on the scale. I don't remember the weight but this was the first hull so it was too light. This is before the kevlar reinforcements. To get the right strength at some critical points i put 60gr
kevlar cloth round the flange, along the waterline, in the center of the
boat round the finbox and at the rear where the rudder axle will be
mounted. That was done after separating the hull from the plug. To make the deck in one moulding, i have made a "deck-plug" It's the whole deck from the bow back to the mounting of the rudderservo. |