Friday, the 5th March, 2010

Getting stuck in...

To fill the gaps between the boards in the hull, I have chosen to use a more modern alternative to the traditional Oakum - a mixture of hemp fibre or cotton and pine pitch, hammered home.  My product of choice is Epoxyl - a two part epoxy filler that looks and smells like Araldite but comes in one litre tubs instead of 10ml tubes.

Now any of you that have used Araldite before will know that it sets like a rock and sticks (as the saying goes) like sticky stuff does to a blanket.

Working with it in larger quantities though is quite difficult.  It is a bugger to mix becaue the hardener is harder than the resin.  It gets everywhere.  It collects dirt and dust better than a Dyson (or in exactly the same way a Hoover doesn't), and applying it is fine in thin coats - but for the S.S.Natasha (S.S. now stands for Sinking Ship) where some of the holes are now large enough for deviant sexual practices - it has a tendency to drip down somewhat faster than your TV screen (this is only funny if your understanding of molecular science is sufficiently advanced to realise that glass is not solid - only a very viscious liquid - that in the right environment will drop under the force of gravity over a very long period of time - many thousands of years in the case of your TV - even the extended Dixon's warranty will have expired by then).

However, by the time I had mixed my third batch, the first lot had securely bonded my index and middle fingers to the back of the filling knife.  I found this arrangement much better for subsequent applications as I needed to apply less force in holding the filling knife.

It also does a remarkably good job of bonding blue paint dust to my skin - giving my hand the appearance of being covered in artistically abstract prison tattoos.