Fiberglassing

Experimental Boat Build – Fiberglassing the Frame

This page is about Fiberglassing the boat frame, check out the main project index for the rest.

There is a YouTube video about this which shows the entire process, or scroll down for pictures and words.

I wrapped the frame in Woven Roving fiberglass fabric, this has continuous strands of glass fibre which run from one side of the fabric to the other. This means that strands don’t fall out of it like Chopped Stranded Mat which is made out of lots of short strands bonded together. I wrapped up the whole frame and used string to tie the fabric around the struts:

Next I moved the boat to my shed and used Marine grade Polyester Resin to make the fiberglass fabric rigid. I used around 3.5Kg of resin in all which is about 1Kg resin to 1Kg of mat:

There are still a few bits that are not covered with fiberglass, but these will be dealt with once I have skinned the boat and I reinforce the inside. For now the frame is very rigid, although I have been quite sparing with the resin, so there is still some flex in the actual surface of the fiberglass. It may be been better to use a combination mat which has chopped stranded mat on one side and woven roving on the other, so it would soak up more resin and become more rigid. For now though, the boat frame is more than rigid enough to skin up, which I will cover in the next section.