We started with some simple materials; sheets of clear plastic, wax paper, 3M blue masking tape, and a sharpie.
First, I carefully spread the clear plastic sheet out over the hole inside the keel trunk followed the contour of the curve. I then taped off a couple of edges of the plastic sheet.
This allowed me to trace the outline of the hole on to the plastic, thus getting an idea of what the shape of the patch I was going to cut. I also traced the outline of the sanded edge of the hole that beveled towards the hole itself.
The photo above is an example of what I am describing. The outside line that I am cutting along is the beveled edge of the fiberglass, while the inside line drawn on the plastic is the actual hole itself. So what we do is use the pattern to cut a single piece of fiberglass.
After cutting this piece of fiberglass, we cut a smaller piece of fiberglass using the line on the inside of the plastic sheet. The idea here is to cut subsequently smaller ovular shapes of fiberglass that will stack one on top of another, forming a cone or pyramid-like shape.
Here you can see I verified that the smaller piece of fiberglass I cut actually fit the hole. This obviously means that the larger piece will fit nicely over the hole, forming a nice blanket.
The photo above shows Pops cutting a third and fourth layer of fiberglass that will be even smaller than the other two sheets placed on the wax paper. We cut a total of 4 layers for the patch that went on the outside of the hull up in the keel trunk.
Once the ovular pieces were cut, we mixed the Epoxy Resin with the Slow Hardener. The photo above shows me reading all the warning labels and instructions on the chemical containers. According to their documentation, I needed to mix 5 parts resin for every 1 part hardener. Luckily we bought the pumps that go on top of the cans, so measuring was pretty easy. We mixed in the small silver paint can shown in the photo, and stirred up the resulting compound for a couple of minutes.
Here Pops gives a little taste test to verify the mix is indeed 5 to 1. Seriously though, don't try that at home kids.
Once the mix had been stirred for a couple of minutes, we laid each fiberglass patch sheet on the wax paper. Starting with the largest piece, we carefully wet down each fiberglass patch with a brush and stacked the next smaller piece on top.
As you can see from the photo above, it helps tremendously to wear the proper gloves. This will allow you to work freely without the resin sticking to your hands, and it will also keep your fingers away from chemicals that are not very nice to your skin.
Once all of the pieces had been brushed down and stacked on top each other, we took a smaller piece of wax paper in which to use to apply the patch and flipped the entire patch over so that the largest piece was facing away from the wax paper. This will allow that largest piece to face towards the hull itself when applying the patch. This may seem counter-intuitive, but according to the West Systems training videos that is the proper method in which to apply the patch.
We then applied a gratuitous amount of epoxy mix around the keel trunk hole.
Once the surrounding fiberglass had been adequately soaked in epoxy mix, we took the piece of wax paper with the patch on it and pressed in over the hole.
After lining the patch up over the hole we used the cylindrical edge of a medium sized screwdriver to run upright along the wax paper, working out any air bubbles. From here, we will have to let the epoxy cure overnight and come back tomorrow to peal off the wax paper and view the results of our work. More to come....
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