I like to joke that I bring Old World Craftsmanship to my work. Old World like Neanderthal, the fine kind of workmanship you get from precision woodworking tools such as heavy clubs and sharpish rocks. One of the things I like about building is all the layers of increasingly fine-tuned craftsmanship one brings to a project.
So all of my corners, more or less, meet each other, give or take a half inch or so. Unfortunately, to coat the whole thing with fiberglass, the tolerances had to be a little more fine than that. I knew all along that I was going to have to make all the edges smooth and even.
With all the lumber we ripped, we had no shortage of useful shims. I made little shims to cover all these under or over cuts.
I didn’t worry about fit that much, just that the shim covered the error. I knew I could trim and sand the results.
I had to coat everything with a first coat of thin epoxy, then followup with thickened epoxy.
It was a lot of gooey mess and didn’t look any too pretty mid-process.
I held the shims in with little brads until the epoxy had set.
After the epoxy set, I pulled the brads and trimmed off the extra.
The fiberglass sheeting calls for rounded corners to make a good bond. I pulled out my router for the job and bought a 3/8 inch rounded bit. That was the minimum radius that Glen-L suggested.
God, that is a scary and amazing tool.
It left beautiful rounded edges.
Next, we fill all the holes with a non-oily wood filler. For some reason, I’ve always loved this process.
4 million screw holes come back to haunt me. I filled ever one as well as various chips and dings and rough corners.
Followed by a day with an orbital sander.
It slowly starts to look pretty smooth and nice.
By the time we were done, it was lovely. Smooth and beautiful with edges that looks like magic.
