... He would have created plastic trees! Not original I am afraid, it came from a teeshirt in Cowes.
The past week was spent working on various forms of 'plastic lay-ups' and 'vacuum bagging', (which, I hasten to add, is not some form of Public School initiation or perversion), culminating in our first assessed assignment, constructing a model of a racing yacht approximately 950mm in length.
Basically, if you start from the premise that everything in building a Fibre Glass hull is toxic and dangerous to the environment and potentially to one personally, you can't go far wrong. That said it is a useful addition to the Boat Builders range of techniques and in the current environment is essential given the very high proportion of GRP and Epoxy boats that are on the market. (I should stress that once cured it is perfectly safe - well unless you start drilling it or sanding it.)
As a manufacturing process however, while I am sure there must be economies of scale, it appears to be massively wasteful in nitrile gloves, brushes, mixing pots, mixers and cured resin, all of which appears to have a half life of about 10,000 years in land fill: This is not an environmentally friendly process.
The matrix (the term for the liquid bit of the laminate before it has cured) is made up of polymer resin and an initiator (Methyl Ethyl Ketone Peroxide - YES it is as nasty as it sounds) the resin uncured remains viscous and extremely sticky and is impervious to just about everything, when the initiator is mixed with it it initiates an exothermic reaction during which it hardens... there is a certain imperative to get it where it is meant to go.
Sadly, this isn't always as simple as it appears and you tend to end up with your clothes stuck to your skin and pencils and miscellaneous tools stuck to the bench, floor, or yourself. In the midst of this you are trying to place and 'wet out' the reinforcement (the Glass fibre) which in turn sticks to the brush, tools, bench, etc, etc.
Add to this the concept of pigmented Gel Coat, noting that the pigments like the Resin don't dry unless they are part of the cured matrix, and you are in a whole world of pain. The pigment gets everywhere, is sticky, and can only be removed from one's hands by abrading off the top couple of layers of skin. The Gel Coat is also the shiny bit on the outside, which you can't see until you turn it out ofd the mould, at which point you find that the brush you used had decided to moult.
The other thing to bear in mind is that when working with 5 other people in a space the size of a longitudinal double garage it doesn't really matter how clean or careful you are, somebody else will ensure that there is enough pigment, resin, etc. around so everybody can share that unique sticky experience.
Photographs will follow in the next post once I have completed filling the gaps and polishing up my model boat...
