Building a Wooden Jon Boat..pt.5

Still making good progress the past few days. At the moment I am in the process of fiberglassing and encapsulating the frames with epoxy. This is slow and tedious work, but it is much easier to do this while the frames are still flat on the work bench. It takes 24hrs. for the epoxy to set up hard so you need to plan ahead to do as much as possible on each side.

On the side of the frames that is sheathed in 1/4″ plywood, I have laid down 6oz. cloth and then saturated it with epoxy. I spread out the epoxy using a plastic spreader, and then roll it out as even as possible using a foam roller. I am doing two coats of epoxy over the glass with sanding between coats, so this has taken a couple of days to finish.

On the other side of the frames, I am doing the same process but without the cloth as this area will not be subject to as much wear with foot traffic inside the boat. The idea is still to completely encapsulate the frames so that no raw wood is exposed. Prior to the epoxy coatings, I sanded all of the wood surfaces and eased the sharp edges over so that the epoxy will not chip off.

This part of boatbuilding is not much fun, but careful prep now will make finishing the inside of the boat much-much easier.

The next step is to precut all of the plywood for the sides and bottom of the boat and then once again add the 6oz. cloth and roll out the resin while the pieces are flat on the bench. After that is accomplished, then the actual assembly of the boat begins. I will have to keep an eye on the weather as at that point all of the work will be outside of the shop.

Stay tuned!