Standamaran: Hot Coat

As you may know, I have a long-running project to build what I hope will be the ultimate carp on the fly floatation.  The Standamaran SUP.  Click here for the full history.  The last we left the project I had just completed the laminate coat.

After you put down the laminate coat, the next step in surf-board building is to apply something called the hot (or fill) coat.  This is a thin coat of resin (epoxy in this case) that fills in all the pits and voids in the fiberglass and smooths things out a little bit.  I used a squeegee spreader to lay down the epoxy and foam brushes to smooth it.  That worked OK, but between the oddly angled surfaces, out gassing issues with the foam blank and a distinct lack of patience when it came to sanding out imperfections in previous steps things got a little ugly.  I am not going to dwell on the details, but suffice it to say the final product is full of enough waves and imperfections to make a professional surf-board builder curl up in the corner and cry.  There are pinholes everywhere.  There are drips, there are blobs. Believe me, the picture doesn't do it justice.

I don't really care though because it seems to be on target functionally.  It seems structurally sound and at 26lb it came in on target for weight.  Although I could clean up the appearance allot by sanding it down and applying another coat of epoxy (called a gloss coat) I decided to save the time, energy and weight and let it ride.   I didn't even sand the fill coat, because ugly is, after all, a secondary concern to functionality.

Well now - that sounds done right?  Except for some rigging I agree, and I finally got it loaded up on the car yesterday ready to go on it's maiden voyage.  More to follow on that when I have time.