GRP

In case you think that all I do is work with wood - here is a bit about the composites work that we do on the course. Most of the ’standard syllabus stuff is polyester and glass (GRP) but project based composites also include carbon fibre and other ‘exotics’. For example I’m intending to use uni-directional carbon filaments to reinforce my centre board and rudder.

First off is the City and Guilds level 2 GRP assignment. This is to laminate a flares box. As an exercise in GRP lamination it’s quite hard - because it is so small and has so many fiddly corners and edges. A good learning exercise. Here is the ‘flares box’ that I ended up making.

Yellow - why Yellow? Well, apparently laying up yellow gel-coat is hard as it tends to show the glass lamination through more than other colours. A bit of pigment in the first layer of laminating resin seemed to do the trick.

Why anyone would want to keep flares in a box like this is a mystery. I, like most sailing people, I suspect, keep flares in a watertight polyethelene container with a screw lid!

Other members of the team got a bit carried away with gelcoating with some very colourful results.

Last week we did GRP repairs. Very useful as a way of making money but amazingly, not on the C&G syllabus! We took a hammer to an old GRP tender, make ourselves some holes and then proceeded to fix them. I end up with a ‘corner’ for which I have to make a non-trivial former before I can start my repair - and I neglect to catalyse the polyester for the former properly so have to make the former again the next day.

Here is the evidence

The hole

The former loosely in place over the hole (the trimmed former is attached to the inside of the hull)

The former is now attached to the inside of the hull using polyester resin. I pretended that this was an ‘outside access only’ repair and did all the work from the outside - including jiggling the former through the hole while attached to a stick.

After this the damage gets laminated over before being ground down ready for gel coat.

I neglected to take any pictures of the gel coat work…..

We still have more GRP work to do. The scale is small (a model boat) but we will cover hull/deck joints, vacum bagging and, knowing Justin, quite a lot more ‘in passing’. Other members of the team brought in broken surf boards etc and were instructed how to fix the unfixable.

This is all useful stuff but it is pretty clear to us all that you don’t need to go on a nine month boat building course in order to become competent in basic composite construction.

How am I going to make time to finish Seapod?