While inspecting the stringers and tabbing, I discovered that the tabbing on the starboard side looks twice as thick as the port side, and extends farther down the hull bottom and farther up the side of the stringer. It looks like a QC glitch and the second layer of mat and roving got left off the port side. It’s probably not a coincidence that the tabbing on the port side was showing signs of delamination.
So I trimmed the port tabbing back to within about ¾” of the stringer and ground everything down to good fiberglass so I could tab the stringer more securely. The tabbing was pretty thin and wasn’t hard to peel off.
In addition to replacing the tabbing on the port stringer, I decided to add a bulkhead forward of where my water tank will go. The bulkhead will form the aft wall of a below deck storage compartment, and the forward wall of the water tank compartment. Because I took it from stringer to stringer, it should add a lot of stiffness to the forward sections of the lower hull panels. Here’s the bulkhead tacked in place and coated with thinned epoxy resin, ready to be glassed in.
And the port tabbing redone with four layers of 2408 biaxial and epoxy resin. Using epoxy resin may be overkill, but it makes a stronger laminate that will bend farther before breaking than polyester resin will. I only want to do this once, and the difference in cost between polyester resin and epoxy for this little structural adventure is less than $50. And using epoxy with a fast hardener allowed me to do this work at temperatures that were cooler than ideal for polyester resin.
That’s all for now. Gotta go finish my Christmas shopping. Merry Christmas, everyone!
Dave