Building my own Kevlar - Carbon canoe

The Layup

Canoe project forum

Running total of cost

Canoe Project Home - The Strongback - The Form - The Mold (part 1) - The Mold (part 2)
The Layup (part1) - The Layup (part 2) - The Layup (part 3) - Project Finish (gunwales) - Project Finish (floats) - Project Finish (seats)

The Rebuild Part 1

Click on images below for high resolution images

09-21-2005 - Mostly sunny, 85 degrees and finally after waiting for the weather to clear, my wife to have a day off (to care for the children) and getting over illness; I was happy to get started with the layup. The cloth was waiting, calling me to use it.

I have the supplies I need (I hope).

I place the hybrid cloth on the mold and cut it to length. The starboard side looks good to me.

The port side shows the gap expected where the width of the fabric does not reach to the gunwale on this side. This is to be filled with with the scrap cut where the cloth falls over the bow and stern.

I marked my measuring cups so as to not measure the hardener and epoxy in the same cup.

I mixed my first batch of Raka127 epoxy with 631 hardener of the same brand in a 5:1 ratio. This is where things start going wrong.

This is a picture of a mixing pot melting as the epoxy batch heats up. I divided it when the paint pan started smoking.

The first layer of the layup from the port side, conclusion . . . bummed

My list of major errors on the layup thus far are:

starting the layup alone
not waiting until I was fully recovered from a illness
performing the layup on a day with too much wind
making too large of a batch of epoxy

starting the layup alone (yes it deserves a repeat)
panicking when paint pan started to smoke
not being able to smooth out wrinkles and bulges
trying to move wet out fabric
trying to move the wet out again fabric (and again, and again) but not enough
waiting too long before trying to remove bulges (minutes to rest)
not taking into account the amount of unraveling to the twill weave fabric at cuts (before cutting)
not finishing the layup in one day (I felt sick again and had to stop)

There may be more which should be added to the list, however you get the idea. Just look at the picture to the right (warring, the link is to a high resolution version hence a large file)

Here is another view of the poor quality I achieved. Some of the fabric was not wet through, bulges, and the underlying mold was damaged by the adhering epoxy when I tried to fix the problems.

09-23-2005 - Having a sick feeling in my gut about the waste of all that expensive hybrid fabric and epoxy I have decided to try to 'fix' the bulges in the layup the best I can. The worst thing that could happen is that I would still scrap the cloth and start again only having used a little more epoxy.

In my first attempt at fixing the bulges I cut along the crest of the bubble with my Dremmel tool using an abrasive disk. My plan was to mix a small batch of epoxy and force the bubble down by hand overlapping the seams where necessary. At 74 degrees it was a much cooler (and overcast) day that fact combined with the low volume of the epoxy batch made for a long set time.

After 1 1/2 hours later my 'fix' was finished. The result is not perfect, however, it is better than the bulge with which I had started.

Fixing the bulges in the layup is going to be very time consuming. After cutting the grove in the crest of the bulge I need to wait for each small batch of epoxy cure in order to start on the next defect.

Being a curved surface I could find no effective way to hold down the fixed layup while waiting for it to cure other than by hand. I thought I might try a sandbag of sorts, however I did not want it to become part of the layup.

My second 'fixed' defect. At this rate I am considering only fixing the 'football' area of this first layer and removing the rest. As seen in the picture to the right there are still plenty of places where the hull needs to be fixed

10-03-2005 - After more rain and thought of what to do I tried to repair the other bulges in the hull. I tacked down mixing sticks over the cuts in the hull to hold down the cloth where needed. In some places the cloth was fully saturated in other it was not. My methods of fixing the first layer have meet with mixed success. Tacking down the wood strips with nails of course damaged the underlying mold, however, I do not now plan to use it again.

While I was not able to to fix each bubble, bulge or fold in the cloth of the first layer of layup and some more will need to be cut out on the sides where it will not adhere to the mold, it is better than having wasted the fabric entirely. I did run into some difficulty with cutting the cloth due to my wife's dog using my cutter as a chew toy.
The final weight of the canoe will be higher than it otherwise would have been due to the extra epoxy I needed to use to make bulges lay flat to the hull.

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