Building a Hull of Glass

Day Seven in Fort Pierce, aka Vagrantshire

Building a hull of glass, watching neighbors disappear, chimichangas

By now the routine is set; we get up before eight, have cereal, and cover ourselves in potentially dangerous chemicals for most of the day. Heaven knows we’ve ingested enough acetone, acid, and aspirin to kill a family of bison and severely curtail many of our essential brain functions. The previous list doesn’t even include tonight’s dinner.

The chemicals we worked with today are designed, so far as we can tell, to Bond, Strengthen, and Protect. Great, as long as they are applied correctly. This is where we come in. After a morning of patching the entire aft starboard quarter of the boat (that’s back right, if you’re thrashing in our wake), we decided to mend all of the remaining (23) large blisters in the afternoon. The benefit of this, briefly, is that the entire hull will be ready to sand and paint at the same time, whereas there would have been lag time had we continued to mend quarters of the hull.

The process for repairing fiberglass in a blister is:

• Open and drain the blister. Let dry for 2 months
• Chisel out the hydrolyzed fiberglass
• Clean the open blister
• Grind the blister so that it is smooth and has beveled edges
• Wipe blister down with TSP (trisodium phosphate) and let dry for 24 hours
• Mix epoxy resin with hardening agent and wet out bottom of blisters
• Wait 30-60 minutes
• Mix epoxy resin with hardening agent and colloidal silica and apply to blister
• Cut fiberglass cloth to the shape of the blister, cutting smaller pieces with same shape depending on depth of blister
• Wet out fiberglass cloth with epoxy resin and hardener
• Press fiberglass cloth into blister, using foam roller to remove excess fluids and air bubbles
• Let cure for 24 hours
• Mix epoxy resin with hardening agent and microlight filler to create fairing compound and spread over blister
• Let cure for 24 hours
• Sand fairing compound so that it is flush with the rest of the hull
• Apply 6-10 layers of barrier coat
• Sand barrier coat
• Paint

If you read all of that, hi Dad. Clearly, the task is neither easy, nor simple, nor clean, nor fun. The constant chiming in of the yokels around the boatyard (“You gotta let that sit for two months you know” “You should have just sandblasted that thang” “Wheeeew”) grates almost audibly against our ears, which are permanently coated with chemicals, dirt, and the dust that used to be our hull.

After completing our work for the day, we hit the beach and had a fine swim, showering as usual behind the concrete outhouse. As we bathed, we discussed robbing a maid’s cart at the Day’s Inn for soap and shampoo during our impending trip to rob the place for ice. Upon our arrival, however, there was no maid’s cart to be seen, and the point was moot.

Dinner was 10 chimichangas at $2.50 from the frozen food section of Walmart, as well as a two-liter bottle of Sam’s Choice root beer. We split it down the middle. Cost per person: $1. The salad we got with it was $2.50 itself, somewhat spoiling our audacious attempt at thrift, but it tasted great. The evening concluded with reading, writing, and sleeping.

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