Mine has been a life filled with epoxy -- even if the fiberglass weave is NOT filled with epoxy, though it's supposed to be.
These last few days, I have been working on laying down two coats of epoxy on the inside of the hull. This layer covers the fiberglassed lower three panels, and, uh, the rest of the panels, which I suppose we could call the upper six panels (three on a side). It gets all shiny (only to be made dull later with more sanding, prior to the final, crowning shininess of varnish.
That's all clear, right? I hope so. I want so desperately to be understood.
Well, surprise, there was a wrinkle. Here's what happened. Just before fiberglassing those three bottom panels on the inside of the hull, I had wiped the whole interior down with rags moistened with denatured alcohol, which smells the way I imagine ol' granddaddy's still smelled, if I had had an ol' granddaddy and if he had operated a still.
The point of all that wiping was to remove Evil Contaminants from the surface. Epoxy doesn't stick so well to a surface that, say, had been partially covered with masking tape, and then the tape was removed, but there was sticky-stuff residue.
Of course, that's what I went and did anyway -- contaminate things, I mean. After the fiberglassing, which as you will recall went reasonably well, I went on to this step, but FORGOT to clean up the residue from the packing tape I used on the two #2 panels when I did the fiberglassing of the two @1 panels and the bottom panel.
So, when I put on that first layer of epoxy, it didn't stick so well to the number 2 strakes. The phenomenon is called "fisheyes," and I don't know who came up with this term or what they have against fish, but it looks awful.
In fact, it looks something like this.
It's pretty easy to see where that packing tape was, huh? Oh, shit.
I'm gonna have to do a bunch of sanding and re-coating to fix this. Gosh, I wish there was some way I could write this off (to something other than premature brain death). Oh, well.
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