Carbon under the floor, floor glued to boat

Laid down some carbon on the floor this morning. One more coat of epoxy this afternoon (the third) then plan to glueing in place tonight.

This was the first time I've used CF cloth and I approached it as if it were glass. As this section won't be seen I didn't vacuum bag it or even use peel ply. In fact I even used 2nd grade cloth, where you can expect small runs that are visually apparent but don't reduce strength. Future applications are going to be stricter.

I found the carbon hard to handle. Fragile around the edges and prone to movement. In the end I used a roller technique always pulling away from my original wet out. Once wet I squeegied hard to try and get it to penetrate. It seemed quite hard to get the epoxy to penetrate the cloth.

Just as with a glass application I taped the edges and cut away the excess when the epoxy got to the tacky stage.

The floor is placed over a wood spine and clamped at the edges so that its roughly matching the shape it'll end up being..

Once sealed I took a deep gulp and glued it down. You can't see what how it's joining so lots of weight on the deck and fingers crossed!

In other news I'm playing with the idea of a teak divider between the bow plates. It would be a bit thinner than this and would look nice - take the eye away from any glue line imperfections and grain mismatches on the two sides.