It took 3 days with other commitments, but I managed to sheathe the deck. I laid it in 8 separate panels, carefully planned to minimise the length of the joins, with the dynel cloth being exactly one metre wide. When I laid more than one contiguous panel on the one day I simply located the two pieces of cloth closely together with the narrowest of overlaps. When I started again the next day I sanded a feather edge on the old panel and placed two layers of masking tape around 1/2" (12mm) from the edge so the new panel would overlap slightly. But as usual, preparation is the key to a successful outcome. I had kept the deck plywood just clear of the 6 chainplates, I made up pieces of Huon Pine as packers around the chainplates and glued them in with epoxy, with Sikaflex Pro on the surfaces that touched the bronze chainplates, as in the first photo below. The reason for this is that chainplates that penetrate the deck are generally a common source of leaks. If the deck plywood is against the chainplates moisture will enter the end grain of the plywood and inevitably rot. In our case, any moisture that does find its way down the chainplates will find the extremely rot-resistant Huon Pine. Teak could also be used here. The other photo below shows another essential preparatory step: the plywood edges at deck edge and hatches received two coats of epoxy resin before the cloth went on. if this is not done, the plywood end grain has a tendency to soak up the resin from the cloth and leave the cloth resin-starved. In the second photo of the hatch opening just abaft the mast hole you can just make out the scarf joint in the plywood, and the cedar tongue and groove under-layer on the Celery-Top Pine laminated deck beam. The perimeter of the deck edge and all hatch openings also needs to be masked and protective plastic sheeting hung to protect the topsides and interior from epoxy runs. And of course all sharp edges have to be rounded over for the cloth to lie over, and all fastening holes need to be filled and sanded. tThe next step is to fair and fill the cloth overlaps, and scour and sand the deck ready for more coats of clear epoxy and hi-build epoxy, before finishing with deck paint. When I've got the hi-build epoxy on I'll post a video of the whole process of laying the deck on Smithy's Boatshed Channel on YouTube, and post it here. In the meantime there's a short video on the dynel sheathing process on Facebook and Instagram, on my Ian Smith Page (Facebook) and IanHughSmith (Instagram)..
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AuthorIan Smith, Boatbuilder (ret'd) Archives
January 2024
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