Hi there, Andy.

After I have draped the dry cloth over the boat, I go over it carefully with a clean fox-tail brush -sort of like a floor broom cut in half with a handle stuck on it. Probably any sort of medium length bristle brush will work, just make sure it is clean.

The brush flattens the cloth against the boat. Ordinary crease and fold marks get straightened out, and you can even fix most of the small blemishes where, for example, perhaps something snagged the cloth in a spot.

You do have to kind of 'read the cloth' to figure out the proper direction and sequence to work in. With the plain (or loose) weave cloth most folks use, there is enough slippage within the cloth that the fibers can be adjusted to where you want them to go.

An exception to that is where you have a factory edge; there, the extra stitching holds the fibers in place. So where there is one, that is the starting place to brush: work away from there to the direction where the cloth is 'free' to relocate.

Being selectively superstitious, I then let the cloth rest like that overnight so it can go through several heating-and-cooling cycles in the shop. In my mind, this lets the cloth 'get used' to its new configuration, and lets small internal tensions work themselves out. Usually just a couple of minutes re-brushing the thing gets it ready for the wet out.

During the wetout step, if some areas start to bulge or pucker, I can work a foot or two ahead of the epoxied area to re-flatten the dry cloth.

Pete Roszyk,
in Snohomish, Washington