Hi there, Sam.

..."lay-up the hooks on plastic sheet so you can
: trim the edges to a neat shape with scissors, then peel off the plastic
: and stick them in place."

Thanks; I wouldn't have thought of that anytime soon.

I screwed three test hooks into the header of a shop doorway and started hanging weights. All three were pretty much the same, except that for two of them I used pigmented epoxy. The base coil size varied some.

All three held 100 lbs. static dead weight with no major bending of the hook or visual stress to the fiberglass/epoxy base.

All three failed when I came close to applying my full weight of 175 lbs., say somewhere around 150.

All three failed where the metal SS rod bent outside the epoxy blob, that is, up on the exposed hook part. Two showed minor stress marks right at the point where the rod enters the epoxy (minor bending?).

One failed also at the underlying bond to the substrate (?), that is, it pulled the glass off the old test panel which I used as a base. This is the hook to the lower right in the photo. That hook also bent in failure but held on long enough to rip up the 6 oz. glass underneath.

To make the rod easier to bend, I heated it to red hot which is why it looks black now. Would that have made it softer or easier to bend afterward, do you think? It would be more difficult to make 16 (one full boat set) of them without heating.

I think this is good enough to put into the current boat I'm working on.

Any criticisms (save those of ugliness) and comments are welcome. Thanks once more, Sam; I appreciate you taking some time to think about this.

Cheers,

Pete,
in Snohomish