Arriving at Somerledi, I started by water-washing the amine blush from the recently patched blisters near the bow on the port side. I had applied peel ply to several of the repairs, but there were a few that did not get this treatment, and so needed the surface wax (contaminate) removed. With a Scotchbrite pad, I made quick work of the task. I rinsed the port side of the hull over its entire length to remove boatyard grit and grime while rinsing the wax from the repairs. While that was drying, I suited up for one last bout of grinding - in the previous work session, my grinder decided to knock off from work after hours of grinding, to allow the heat of the tool to dissipate. So about an hour was spent near the starboard bow, as well as reviewing the starboard side in its entirety.

With the grinding now complete, I tossed the Tyvek suit and got straight to patching areas where blisters were dished out. I tackled this by labeling the deeper grinds, by numbering, and then retracing my steps with a thin sheet of plastic to trace for a copy in 1708 biaxial fiberglass. I removed the template from the plastic sheet, transferred that onto the fiberglass, and then cut out the fiberglass patch. In all, I made my way through about thirty of these deeper patches, before losing all my Sharpie productivity. I would make a switch to the more shallow repairs, requiring just the thickened epoxy filler. For the deeper grinds, I cleaned the repair areas with acetone, followed by a wet out with "neat" epoxy, and finally applying the fiberglass patch with additional epoxy to fully wet the material. I was able to come back to these patches with a coat of fairing compound as well - epoxy thickened with 406 colloidal silica and 407 low-density fairing compound.

Having run out of my ability to make and transfer patch templates to the fiberglass, I pivoted to cleaning and filling the shallow grinds. For Somerledi, the bad news is she has a number of blisters (repaired and forming), the good news is that they are mostly a cosmetic issue, having occurred in just the first (outer) layer of laminate. A significant amount of dry laminate is visible when grinding out the small blisters. So for these shallow blisters, I focused on grinding the blister down to solid glass and then filling with the epoxy-based fairing compound mentioned previously,

I was able to make my way down the complete length of the port side, with roughly a dozen deeper grinds yet to patch with 1708 biaxial glass to call the port side complete. I was also able to sand back the earlier port bow repairs and apply a skim coat of epoxy thickened with West Systems 410 microlight fairing compound. Work coming along nicely, and satisfied with the iterative process thus far.

Total Hrs: 8.25