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Posts: 176
| Well all the tedious prep work was done, the boards were glued up, wetted in, sanded, holes drilled oversized, sanded, 2nd coat, sanded, 3rd coat, sanded, dry fitted, refitted to adjust and last night we had the weather to put it in.
It's a great feeling because everything starts with the stringers, which we had done, then the floor back to the transom, but now the big work can get done, before it was tedious "invisible" work.
We had it planned out. We used the West system epoxy and I used the 205 Fast dry hardener for this because we would be in the 40-60 temperature range. We ran 3 equal batches of 15 pumps of epoxy with 15 pumps of hardener, stirred for at least a minute and then added 4 "cups" of silica to get the consistency I wanted, actually the cap of a spray paint can, but it's been the common measuring device I've been using for all my projects. I added them one at a time but there are no pictures because I had gloves on with epoxy all over. You add the silica one at a time and stir it in. WEAR A GOOD MASK! That stuff is ultra light weight and blows all over. We got the good disposable respirators. You need to stir the silica in one cup at a time because it's so powdery its hard to get a blend, by the 3rd and 4th it's much easier.
Then we had saw horses in place with the transom, and I spackled it on like doing a tile floor, I bought both a yellow spreading knife and a red one, one was six inches wide the other about 9". It was probably at least an 1/8" thick on the transom. You could stand the stir stick up in the pot and it would stand there without sagging so the mixture wouldn't run. We needed two of us to make this happen because the stirring and mixing process takes about 10 minutes a batch and you want to be spreading it before it dries up.
We fitted it in, we had the clamps and 2x4's we were using to press it in place all layed out. We fitted it in, clamped it in and started adjusting the placement. We also were happy because we got a pretty even "ozzz" of product out of the sides with no air holes when we clamped it. We did chase and reclamp areas to get more ozzz. We screwed down a couple of 2x2's to the floor and pressed in 4 2x4's to get pressure on the bottom where we couldn't clamp. I stood on them to get pressure then we clamped them in from the top to keep the pressure. By standing on them I could put a bow in the board that added spring pressure back to the transom.
Here are the pictures:
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 2018-04-25%2018.18.08_preview.jpeg (128KB - 411 downloads)
2018-04-25%2017.53.09_preview.jpeg (143KB - 395 downloads)
2018-04-25%2017.53.02_preview.jpeg (154KB - 498 downloads)
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