So I thought I was going to have a couple weeks of heated shop time this winter to paint the boat, gelcoat the floor, and finish all the necessary repairs and sanding in prep for that, but I didn't, so once I was ready I launched back into that stuff this spring.
Lately, I've been fixing the rotted out potion behind my coamings. On my Sailstar the deck comes down at a 90 degree angle and then continues for maybe 1.5-2", and this little strip that goes along the top of the cockpit is what my coamings bolt to. About 10" of it was rotted in one place (which I was able to dremel/angle grind into and find). And then there was another L-potion where it angled back across the transom that had another few inches rotted as well.
My technique was to just use some 1/4" plywood I'd bought (at a price) for another part of the boat project. I know you said exterior grade Greenlake, but I just can't justify buying any more wood right now (also working on a tiny house - absolute worst time to build lol.) So anyways, my understanding of laminating wood is that that just means putting a layer of glass/epoxy on both sides? So that's what I did with my lighter cloth. Squeegeed the epoxy out and everything, and also coated all the edges (after sanding and acetone of course.) Then, once both sides had dried (I laminated one side at a time and propped it up on the mixing stick so it wouldn't dry to my work surface) I used GelMagic/Thixxo to glue and lightly clamp the pieces in place on the boat.
There were only two really hard parts to the project: getting the size of the wood replacement pieces right (took a bit of sanding and reshaping and telling myself 'good enough') and the other was the gelmagic/thixxo. It was so damn hard to get out of the tube...and then I discovered the cap was on. So after that Gelmagic-splosion all over my new, organized worktable, I took the cap off the next one. But now this one had a similar problem, except it was a brand new (cap off) tube of Thixxo. It was sooo dang hard to get to come through those tips they give you. I actually ended up spraining my wrist struggling with two hands on the caulk gun trigger to dispense enough of it to try and fill the gaps between my laminated wood pieces and the boat.
I'm wondering if over the winter my supplies got exposed to colder temps than the thixxo likes, and I'll need to do that hot water bath thing. Has anyone else had to do that with the stuff? I've just reverted to hand mixing it at this point. It comes out of the caulk gun fine, but once the tip is on it gradually becomes impossible to pull the trigger. And this is even with S3's enhanced caulk gun that gives you 12x instead of 8x or whatever.
I actually hadn't used Thixxo until just now, all my previous supply was S3's Gelmagic (also in caulk tubes) and I never had a problem with them and their tips. Does thixxo just supply bad tips for their tubes?
Here's pics of the above:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharingOf course I've still got to "connect" my repair to the old deck with fiberglass and fair it to look nice, but the major part is done, now it's all just playing with goop.
I do want to get this Thixxo thing figured out though, because I was planning to use it in place of the Filleting mixture to do 4 long fillets to connect plywood to under my benches (i call them my "footboards" because the back of your feet would butt against them as you sit on bench.) Anyways, I wanted to use Thixxo/Gelmagic for this because it WAS very easy to just shoot out of the caulk gun in long strips. So it would save both time and money since Fillet stuff is insanely expensive and I don't have the patience or time for self-mixing at this point. So yeah, I need to figure out if all my batch (4 tubes left) of Thixxo is no good to begin with, or if I need to give up on my caulk gun idea because of the tips or if they can be reconstituted or what.