A gooey evening

January 30. Happy Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day indeed.

This evening was supposed to be a bunch of things OTHER THAN glassing the deck: fiber-glassing the seat back and the bars which reinforce the hatches, epoxying the mounting tabs for the seat, and installing the rib under the deck immediately forward of the rear hatch.  Not a big night, but it had to be done.  And it was.  Then it wasn't.

I noticed that the hardener pump was moving in a slightly jerky motion, but it seemed to be pumping what looked like the right amount of epoxy, so i DID NOT STOP.  We'll call that a mistake.  Soooo..... to fast forward a bit, just about the time i was thinking of calling it a night, i looked at everything i'd done and noticed that nothing had cured.  Not a bit.

Merde.

So i spent some time pulling all of the wetted out glass and scrubbing the surfaces with acetone to remove as much of the crappy epoxy as i could.  I replaced the hardener pump and tried a new test batch of epoxy.  If it has cured by Wednesday night i'm in OK shape; if not I'll buy a new set of pumps for both resin and hardener and try again.  If neither of those things work I'll be calling everyone i can think of to figure out what to do.

In a way, this was good luck.  I was originally thinking about doing the deck, and the impact if i had done that would have been bad and irreparable since the deck would show the effects of the crap epoxy forever - no amount of solvents or sanding would have gotten rid of it.