Building the Jarcat 6

Luckily Marg was ready to give spray painting a go. We purchased an inexpensive direct drive compressor with a 40 litre tank and a gravity feed spray gun. We have been using products from Boatcraft Pacific in Brisbane and it was recommended that we use Aquacote epoxy high build primer undercoat. Marg had used this on her dinghy and found that she needed to do a fair bit of sanding when she applied the coating with a brush. The spray finish sounded like the way to go. Marg did some initial coats with the spray gun but with both of us inexperienced with spray painting we ran into trouble keeping the gun spraying enough paint. The undercoat starts gelling fairly quickly - especially in the warm days we have here in northern NSW - maybe we didn't mix in enough thinners. Another problem was that the compressor could not keep up with the gun and we had to wait for the pressure to build up between runs. Needless to say I got frustrated with the process and decided to use a fur roller instead. This worked well with the finish requiring a bit of sanding. At least the paint went on fairly quickly.

Well progress came to dramatic halt in early February when I broke my arm and dislocated my shoulder. I fell off my bicycle whilst riding home from touch football and failed to make a serious impression on the concrete footpath. So for the next seven weeks I was in plaster.
When I finally had the plaster off I thought I would be able to restart the painting but had not realised how sore my arm would be.

I used a fibreglass cloth weighing 84 grams per square metre for the sheathing. This was smoothed over the hull and held in place using staples. I had to hold my gun a fraction away from the plywwod so the staples did not drive flush. With the cloth smoothed I used a paintbrush to apply a coat of epoxy resin and after wetting out an area used a squeegee to push the wetted cloth against the ply skin and remove excess resin. As the resin starts gelling fairly quickly in the summer temperatures here I only mixed about 150 ml at a time. I achieved a good smooth surface with the cloth fully wetted and the fabric weave showing with the first coat of resin. Once this first coat had set and while it was still a bit tacky I applied another coat of resin to fill the weave in the cloth.

The keels were built up using laminations of 20mm meranti. Note that I placed the first lamination on the flattened keel and then cut tapers on the subsequent laminations so that their top edge was level. The final lamination the spanned from near frame 2 to the rear of the keel..

Note that at this point the chine and keel edges have been shaped and the plywood skin sealed with a TPRDA / epoxy resin mix.

After filling any imperfections in the hulls (mainly topping up where I had filled over the screw heads) I moved onto the glass sheathing.