Poppies are in flower, olive trees are in bud, and the sky is nice and blue ...
...but not half as blue as my language has been during the last week
as I've filled and sanded, and filled some more and sanded some more, in preparation for struggling with the polyester and glass fibre with which I'm covering the roof of my camper. And what a struggle! I have done a little bit of composite laying up before but, if I did learn anything useful then, I certainly didn't remember it now. What a mess! Phoenixsp1 had warned me:
Phoenixsp1 wrote:I used polyester resin and chopped strand and also epoxy resin and biaxial cloth / tape on the suntrekker. I found the latter much better to work with and it stuck easier to the plywood. The polyester resin was horrible to work with and made my eyes hurt / itch, if you're using that make sure you get a good respirator and goggles.
Write out 100 times:
I must not ignore what Clive tells me.
I must not ignore what Clive tells me.
I must not ignore what Clive tells me.
...
Anyway, what I lack in expertise and knowledge I try to make up for in bloody-minded persistence. I started with the clamshell which was always going to be more difficult than the rest of the roof but, in the end, it was also going to be less visible so I figured that was the place to begin making a mess. And, oh boy, did I make a mess? Priming it with a thinned out resin was straightforward enough though I did miscalculate how much resin I needed and wasted about half of it. The next stage however, applying a layer of chopped strand mat, was where I really started cocking things up and soon discovered that, with temperatures around the mid twenties, the recommended 2% of catalyst was way too high. The stuff was going off so fast I could barely get it spread over the ply let alone get it impregnated into the mat. There was sticky stuff and mangled mat everywhere. "When father papered the parlour" had nothing on me
(Google it if you're too young to know what I'm talking about 
). Gradually though I began to become master of all I surveyed
(yeah right 
) and today, having successfully laid up a layer of surface tissue, I finally got to put on the 'Dove Grey' gel coat
(Yep, it's going to be grey not white) and I'm relieved to say it doesn't look too bad.
All being well, the grey flow coat tomorrow will be the end of the clamshell and I can then move on to the camper roof proper.
But I've tried ...
