Woven fiberglass cloth

[Mark Bates]

Hi All,

I am in Ireland and a first time boat builder. Its going good enough, slow but good,  and I’m at the stage of covering the undersides which I do want to do for that extra protection. I can’t source dynel cloth other than to ship from the US. I can however get some woven fiberglass cloth and I am looking at a supplier where I can order two 5m x 1m strips of 200g/m square cloth which the company say is used for canoes and surf boards etc so happy enough it will do the job. They also have carbon fibre cloth which is way more expensing and I’m not sure of the abrasion resistance of it so will pass on that I think. Does anyone know of any reason why I shouldnt go ahead with the woven cloth for weight reasons for example, or any other reason? Thanks

Mark

 

[Doug Hermann]

Mark – Fiberglass cloth will be fine. It is my understanding fiberglasscloth provides a slightly stronger hull, but what we would do with these little boats it  seems inconsequential.

Regards, Doug

[Mark Bates]

Thanks Doug,

It’s ordered. I have west system 105/205 epoxy and will apply the strips of cloth lengthways meeting at the centre point along the keel. Now to decide on using the wet or dry method. I had originally thought of epoxying the whole area and allowing to cure before applying cloth with dry method on top of the cured coat. I thought his would prevent the wood soaking up too much epoxy if applying the cloth with dry method straight to the wood.

The west epoxy manual doesn’t say wether I can do this or not.

 

[Doug Hermann]

I am by no means an expert – but the few boats and kayaks I have done- I always laid out the fiberglass cloth over the unfinished bare hull and then got out the epoxy and saturated everything. I would think having the epoxy soaking into the wood, and encapsulating the fiberglass is probably the best “glue” up you could have. It would become one solid matrix. Not several layers stuck together.

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