Kindly Old Dr. K’s Hydrosphere

The deck is laid up in much the same way as the hull.  The deck is somewhat lighter than the hull.  For this boat I’m using two layers of glass and one of kevlar, with a large amount of reinforcement at various places.  There are two additional layers of kevlar at the bow and stern and several layers around the areas at the bow and sterm where the grab loops will be attached.  There are also kevlar ribs in the large flattish areas of the bow and stern deck.  The cockpit area is heavily reinforced to make this region very rigid.  This is because the cockpit area takes the stress of getting into and out of the boat and is also a safety feature in a pin situation. In this boat there are a total of 9 layers of glass and kevlar around the cockpit.

The only innovation I’m bringing to this project is the cockpit.  Old boats like this one had cockpits that were very small by modern standards.  They worked fine, but large cockpits are one of the most intuitively obvious safety improvements of recent years.  So, I made a paper template of the cockpit on my Super Fun and set this template on the deck mold.  This template allows me to lay up the deck up to the limit of my new cockpit, without making a bunch of deck that would only be cut out later.

Here are some pictures of the deck layup process.

The mold was labeled by Ted when he made it decades ago.  Carter Hearn says he think it’s been at least 15 years since anyone used this mold

The deck mold is cleaned and waxed.  The cockpit hole is sealed with a wooden plate for use in vacuum bagging.

The mold has been coated with mold release, polyvinyl dissolved in alcohol.  It forms a plastic film when dry and it sticks to neither the mold nor the epoxy part.  It happens to be purple in this case, just like the pigment I’m using in the boat.

The gelcoat has been applied.  In whitewater boats we don’t use a true gelcoat, which is a different kind of resin specifically designed for cosmetic appearance.  It adds weight without strength, so we just pour a thin layer of the structural resin into the mold so that the finished part does not have exposed glass at the surface. The kraft paper template shows where the new enlarged cockpit will be.

The deck is laid up and ready to cure.  It will be hard to the touch in a couple of hours and ready to pop out in a day or so.

The cockpit has several extra layers of glass and kevlar for rigidity.