Stopping the leaks!

Using 150 stiches to hold the boat together during construction meant drilling 300 holes in the hull, not ideal if you want your boat to float. So now I needed to fill every hole in to make sure that the boat did not leak.

I turned the boat over to start the filling from the inside only to find that some of the epoxy had leaked through the seams and needed to be cleaned up. I gave the hole inside of the hull a sand to clean up the leaks and get it ready for filling the holes.

All of the holes filled in on the hull.
I hope the dots all disapear later.

I did not want to have the grey epoxy fill in the holes as I did not think this would look that great so I made a jar of wood flour by sanding a piece of pine for ten minutes with my belt sander and collecting all of the dust. The idea was that I would use the wood flour (saw dust) to mix with the epoxy and use that to fill the holes. I had noticed that the epoxy made the wood a darker colour when it soaked in. My hope was that the pine being a lighter colour than the ply wood, would mean by the time everything dried it would be a pretty close match. That was the plan any way. However the wood flour did not mix in to the epoxy very well. Everything started off well and it appeared to mix in all right but as I was putting the mixture on to the boat a lot of the fibers from the wood stuck out and it looked terrible. I stuck with it and filled all of the holes but I am still not sure how it will turn out.

Once the epoxy had dried I sanded everything back and was left with a poker dot pattern on the inside of the hull. I think the darker patches are where the epoxy has soaked in to the plywood. Hopefully when I epoxy the inside of the hull these will all disappear.