Hello again Nick,

I haven't used Raka, and I don't pre-coat the wood, but I use the same glass. It seems to me that you are doing things right, but something is obviously up. Did you squeegie the excess epoxy out of the glass after it was wet out? Was the initial wet out of the wood set up well enough to allow you to slide the glass on it without sticking?

If you are having problems with the cloth draping before wetting it out, something about your initial wetout of the wood is causing a problem. The 3.2 ounce glass cut on the bias as you describe should smooth out absolutely flawlessly using a bristle brush if the hull surface is smooth and not sticky. The draped hull should be a smooth, silvery, gleaming thing of beauty before the epoxy goes on. The only exception as Bill points out is that it may not smooth all the way along your stems without splitting and overlapping or other tricks for finishing the stems.

Perhaps irregularities in your initial epoxy coat are interfering with the glass movement. If that is the case, maybe you need to smooth it slightly with fine sandpaper before applying the glass. Unfortunately, this would be a pita because the epoxy will not be really hard yet if you are going for a chemical bond. Perhaps Bill Hamm can advise you how to get the initial coat to behave properly, he prefers this approach. In any case, the way you are cutting it, the cloth should drape perfectly with little effort. I suggest that you might need to figure out why it is not doing so.

By the way, I recommend applying the epoxy to the glass with a roller, and removing excess with a rubber squeegie. This approach works well with the Mas epoxy that I use.

Good luck,

Allan Edie

: Hi Bill,Geo.&Matt, I put the cloth on as good a bias as the
: 44" allows so it's not a true 45* the shop was bout 78*(I
: live in the Tampa
: Bay area so I started about 8:30PM when it was cooling down I used
: a 4" china bristle brush to smooth the glass and seemed to
: have a hard time getting all the bubbles out I played with this as
: long as I dared ,when I started the wetout it was not wicking
: through
: as fast as usual,I saw some bubbles and thought it was starvation
: added more epoxy then was concerned with flotation so I rested
: the
: glass then rewet with a roller and tipped off. I'm wondering if I
: have a glass issue Please respond I'm at my wits end Thanks Nick
: R.