Monthly Archives: April 2015

Close up of a soft eye pad mounted to the deck of a Bufflehead. The pad eyes Hugh Horton used on the Bufflehead deck were made wtih Twaron™ an aramid fiber. The soft pad eyes are strong yet not as likely as rigid pad eyes to catch a knuckle or a knee cap.

Make Your Own Soft Eye Pads

By Tom Pawlak — GBI Technical Advisor

If you look closely at some of the photos in the Bufflehead article, you will notice small eye pads  (also called pad eyes) in strategic locations inside and outside of Hugh Horton’s Bufflehead. Hugh makes this lightweight carbon fiber or Twaron™ reinforced nylon line eye pads for his sailing canoes.

He glues them onto the decks or inside his sailing canoes—wherever they’re needed to hold supplies in place or hold flotation inside the hull. The eye pads are easy to make and amazingly strong. Continue reading

Jeffrey C. Wright aboard FUNKTIONAL with first mate, Chamfer.

Using Google SketchUp to Design a New Cooler

By Jeff Wright — Vice President of Technical Services

Above: Captain and first mate contemplate ways to free up the swim platform and keep the drinks cold aboard the 1986 242 LS, FUNKTIONAL.

My personal boat is a 1986 Formula 242 LS. With a soft riding deep V hull, good performance, and a small but well-appointed cuddy cabin, it is a great boat for me, my wife, and our dog to use for a whole weekend. One shortcoming, besides not having standing headroom in the cabin, is the built-in cooler located in the cuddy cabin. The cooler had a side door and was styled to look like a refrigerator. This may have looked “cool” in the mid-1980s but was impractical. We couldn’t put ice in the cooler without having the water leak out through the door. For any trip longer than one night, I had to use a standard cooler strapped to the swim platform. This was inconvenient and limited the use of the platform at the beach. Continue reading

Zogo, built by French & Webb

Treading Lightly with Zogo

By Grace Ombry

Stephens, Waring & White Yacht Design of Brooklin, Maine, designed Zogo to meet their clients’ concern for treading lightly on their environment. Her owners are longtime summer residents of Stonington, Maine who enjoy low-impact kayaking and rowing around the pristine islands of Merchants Row. They wanted a quiet powerboat with a low carbon footprint to reflect their respect for the waters around Stonington. Continue reading

Fast Blister Repair with Six10

By Tom Pawlak — GBI Technical Advisor

This fast blister repair method is tailored to fixing individual gel coat blisters prior to bottom painting. The advantage of this method is it can repair blisters on hulls recently pulled from the water or hulls that have been out for some time.

Fast Blister Repair Method

  1. Open the Blisters

    Open blisters with a small abrasive tool like 3M’s Rolock™.  2″ diameter sanding disk with 60-grit sandpaper. Make sure you have removed the entire blister, including the edges of the blister dome.open the blisters

  2. Clean the Cavity

    Wipe the cavity clean with an alcohol prep pad or paper towels that have been soaked in isopropyl alcohol. Be generous with the alcohol and change towels frequently so the contaminants are removed rather than spread. Repeat the alcohol wipe process and allow the laminate to dry to the touch. It is particularly important to repeat the alcohol wipe on blisters that were fluid-filled at the time they were ground away.Wipe the blister cavity clean with an alcohol prep pad.

  3. Fill with Six10

    Fill the cavities with Six10 Thickened Epoxy Adhesive dispensed through the static mixing wand.Fill the cavity with Six10

  4. Spread the Six10

    Spread the Six10 Adhesive flush with the surrounding hull with a wide putty knife or plastic spreader. Avoid overfilling the cavities because Six10 is difficult to sand.Spread the Six10 Adhesive flush with the surrounding hull with a wide putty knife or plastic spreader. 

  5. Wet Sand

    Wet sand with 80–120-grit wet/dry sandpaper or wash with water (no soap, no ammonia) and sand dull with 100-grit sandpaper. If you are using Six10 in warm conditions, you should be able to wet sand and bottom paint later the same day. If working in cooler temperatures, allow the epoxy to cure overnight before sanding. wet sand the blister repair area

  6. Paint

    The final step is applying your choice of bottom paint to complete this fast blister repair job.Alkyd finish topcoat

Why this Fast Blister Repair Method Works

Six10 Adhesive is epoxy thickened with fumed silica, which allows the epoxy to remain an excellent moisture barrier. When the static mixer is used to dispense it the blister cavity&nbspis filled with air-free epoxy. This is important because small bubbles in coatings and putties degrade moisture barrier potential by creating shortcuts for moisture to permeate the hull. In the end, Six10 produces a moisture barrier that is better than the original gelcoat.

In our Gelcoat Blister manual, we recommend filling and fairing extensively blistered hulls with WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy thickened with one of our low-density fillers (407 Low Density or 410 Microlight®). The hollow microscopic spheres used to make low-density fillers easy to sand, make them poor moisture barriers. So, the blister manual requires that an effective epoxy barrier coat be applied over the filled and faired surface.

Six10 Adhesive is an excellent option for filling ground-out blister cavities—especially if you don’t plan to barrier coat your hull.

More Good Reasons for Using Six10

Six10 is simple to use. No stirring is required when the epoxy is dispensed through the static mixer. The Six10 cartridge fits any standard caulking gun and always dispenses epoxy at the perfect mix ratio. Six10 makes filling blisters easy and efficient. This is comforting to know whether you’re doing the job yourself or paying someone else to do it.

Caledonia Yawl

Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building

Above: Students of the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building and the recently built Caledonia Yawl.

Students of the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building in Port Townsend, Washington, recently built the Caledonia Yawl, an Ian Oughtred design. The boat was commissioned by the Four Winds Camp on Orcas Island in Puget Sound and is the second one the school has built for them. Instructor Bruce Batchely believes this is the best built boat to come out of the shop so far. They modified the boat to suit the camp’s need for buoyancy and storage and made the spars hollow to keep the rig light. Continue reading

Bicycle Frame Repair vs Wall Art

The Difference Between a Carbon Fiber Bike Frame Repair and Wall Art

by Randy Zajac

I will start by saying that, in my opinion, most carbon fiber bicycle frames that have sustained damage from an impact should not be repaired—there are too many damaged fibers that are typically unseen. The two repaired frames featured in this article had damage caused by operator error, not impact. The last two bicycle frames are prime examples of parts that should not be repaired for safety reasons. Continue reading

The Artistador

Claudia Toutain-Dorbec is a multi-media artist living in northern New Mexico. The Downey Gallery in Santa Fe asked Claudia to create a life-size sculpture in preparation for the city’s 400th birthday celebration which began on Labor Day weekend in 2009 and runs for a year. She created the Artistador, a conquistador who is also an artist, seeking his treasure in art.

Continue reading

laminated denim knife handle

Readers’ Projects, Issue 30

Laminated Denim Knife Handle Material

Knife makers Cliff Fendley and Mike Carter decided to try their hand at making laminated denim knife handle material. After some research, they chose to use WEST SYSTEM 105 Epoxy Resin with 206 Slow Hardener to laminate pieces of denim fabric into blocks from which they could machine knife handles. Mike first made a 5″ x 7″ piece about 1/2″ thick with alternating front and back layers of blue jean denim. Cliff made a 1″ thick 5″ x 5″ Piece from faded blue jean and 1″ thick 5″ x 5″ piece from faded blue jean and a 1″ thick 1″ x 7″ piece from alternating layers of tan and black denim which he twisted before pressing.

Continue reading

Golden Day 1976

Looking Back on Epoxy Technology

How WEST SYSTEM® Products Got Their Start

By Meade Gougeon — GBI Founder

Epoxyworks 28

Cover Photo: Top image – First GBI crew building GOLDEN DAZY in the early ’70s. Bottom image – The Gougeon Brothers, Inc. team in 2008.

 

2009 was the 40th Anniversary of Gougeon Brothers, Inc. 1969 marked a point in the Gougeon brothers’ careers when they applied all they had learned about wooden structures and epoxy technology to manufacture, for the first time, a product utilizing wood/epoxy composite construction. The full story of Gougeon Brothers, Inc. begins long before that date and is sure to continue well into the next 40 years.

Continue reading

A graphite composite fly rod with all of the guides attached with G/flex to maximize the rod’s flexibility.

Attaching Guide Lines to Fly Rods with G/flex

By Tim Veale

Above: A graphite composite fly rod with all of the guides attached with G/flex to maximize the rod’s flexibility.

Fly fishing, particularly for Atlantic Salmon, has been my lifelong hobby. The fly rod itself has an ancient past but its technical prowess as an instrument to launch line and fly to a designated spot on the river was epitomized by the arrival of handcrafted split bamboo rods in the late nineteenth century. Continue reading