Attaching Brackets to Stabilizers

The original plan was to apply resin to the wooden bracket pieces, assemble them with the outrigger receiver tubes and place them on the stabilizers. Following this I was going to fillet the joints and apply 12 oz biaxial cloth up the sides, over the top edges and back down the insides of the brackets.

Well, I should have known better than to try to do this all in one go.

The resin application to the wood was fine, as was assembling the brackets and tubes and mounting them on the stabilizers. Using an aka tube to keep the bracket tubes properly oriented worked well, too. However, trying to apply fillet material didn't quite work as the brackets kept moving about.

I ended up scraping off all the fillet material and cleaning it from the brackets and tubes.

I had spread out a number of 12 oz strips of cloth on the plastic covered workbenches. Prior to working on the wood I poured resin poured on the strips to allow it to soak in and saturate the strips. The idea was that I would apply the cloth on the filleted brackets and things would be just fine.

Now there was no fillet material to round out the joints, and I had cloth saturated with resin that would shortly set. What to do?

Well, I applied the strips to the brackets anyway. The longer strips wrapped over the top edges of the brackets and down the insides. With the biaxial weave the cloth was able to bend over the 4mm plywood fairly well and stay flat against the inside wall. It even managed to make the 90 degree turn where the brackets meet the top of the stabilizer.

Once the cloth strips were in place the wooden bracket pieces were fairly well fixed in place, so I decided to fillet them and the tubes with the remaining fillet material. This was still rather messy, and the results were nowhere near as clean as I would have liked. Sigh....there will be a bit of cleanup work needed once this stuff hardens!

In addition to the stabilizer brackets I applied some patches to areas on the stabilizers where I went a bit too deep with the sanding, and to similar places on the edges of the top of the main hull.

As I was running short on mixed resin I decided to not coat both sides of the main hull mounting bracket pieces. Instead, I coated one side and let it set with the bracket in its position on edge with the bottom piece.

Checking on the cloth on the brackets I noticed some of it was pulling away from the wood. After pushing it back in place I covered it with plastic and used small plastic clips to hold it in place. This generally worked, but some of the shorter fibers along the edges escaped. They will just have to be removed after the resin hardens.

There will be a bit of sanding this weekend, followed by a bit more filleting and glass application.