Laminating stems with Norglass

Last week started off slow then suddenly sped up. I was waiting on glue for a few days, so I spent that time doing a bit of work on my other boat, and catching up with a few jobs.

Thankfully a whopping great package of resin, glue and paint arrived from the team at Norglass Paints. They have jumped on board and are supplying the paint and epoxy systems for the boat. I am so happy to be using Norglass, as they are a local family owned business making all their products here in Australia. I believe we should all be buying locally made products and supporting our economy. We're lucky here in Australia to have a great brand like Norglass.

To laminate the stems I ripped up strips of 50mm by roughly 5 mm strips of recycled Oregon. It was high quality old growth timber, and in this application the odd nail hole wasn't of any concern.

I then screwed blocks to the loft floor on the outside line of the stem, both bow and stern. I then covered everything in packing tape. Once everything was in place and the clamps were at the ready I then laid thin plastic on the bench and laid all the strips down next to each other. Next I mixed up some Norglass Norsystem Boat Epoxy Resin, mixed it with some glue powder till it was a thick syrup and applied to every strip, on both sides, with a brush. I was pleasantly surprised with the high viscosity of the Norglass resin, which will be very handy when it comes to wetting out fibreglass.

The fun comes when we have to wrestle a 2.4 meter long stack of sticky strips onto the loft floor and around the tight curves. Thankfully it all went smoothly and the next day I ended up with 2 lovely curved stems. A few passes through the thicknesser and they were ready to be scarphed.

I then cut scarphs into the ends of the keel and the stems, and glued them together. I now have a completed backbone assembly that is ready for moulds.