Time to build a hard top bimini! It's the biggest single build we've done so far and it's turning out to be a lot more difficult than we expected. Join us for this Part 1 video of our hard top bimini build. Total Boat wanted to help out with this build and sent us some product to use. Total boat is a company which makes products for use on many of your boat projects and if you want to check them out they gave us a one time discount code you can use at totatboat.com! The code is: jradventures
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this video next week when we get to see how well all our prep work did or didn't go!
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[Music]
[Music]
but no matter what the country
[Music]
a hard bimini
is something that if you don't have it
you kind of envy it but at the same time
it is a very very difficult or expensive
thing to acquire or build either way we
have been planning for a long time to
eventually do a hard bimini
and just kind of the way things played
out we decided to do it now
and yeah this is definitely the single
hardest project we've ever done on the
boat so our boat came with this canvas
bimini soft top it had the metal
structure which was pretty good the helm
station has a little zip out thing so
you could peek up through and see the
sails while you're underway but its
waterproofness was lacking and the
zippers were really starting to degrade
over time we could hardly open it
anymore also for whatever reason our
particular soft top got a lot of mold on
it we also have these solar panels
flexible solar panels on the top that we
had kind of just used big washers and
they would tear out we lost two of them
in storms those afternoon storms that
come through in charleston where you get
like 50 knot gusts we lost two solar
panels over a couple different months so
that was getting expensive so now is the
time to do the hard bimini so first
things first we're cutting off the
little track light we had around the
cockpit and then we just cut off the
soft top which seems a little bit crazy
but has to be done
[Music]
so once we've cut off the top and pull
it off it really looks like a different
boat here it's kind of surprising how
weird it is not to have a covered
cockpit
this makes us super eager to uh get the
build going i will say that we were
super naive about how much work this was
gonna take so the first things first the
plan is to build a wooden mold and we're
gonna seal that so that we can actually
lay glass up on top of it we need to
figure this out a little bit there's
definitely some experimentation that's
going to have to happen but we're pretty
sure that this is a viable means of
doing this
because we don't want to do it in
separate pieces off the boat we want to
do it all on the boat that would be the
other options to to make a mold take the
mold to land and build pieces and bolt
them back together we consider that but
ultimately we want to have one big solid
hardtop yesterday yesterday we got a
fair bit done but today the weather has
turned windier than it was supposed to
be
so we're not going to be able to
continue with as good of progress but
here's what we got i got a plastic tarp
down on the entire thing to keep it from
getting wet until we actually do the
glass layup
and we
underneath started putting in these
blah
uh or pulled the mold down and keep it a
good form with the metal piping below i
still gotta put these
seams uh marry these seems a little bit
better
and
then basically the mold will be prepared
i had an idea that maybe this plastic
could be used as a mold release agent if
i could get the plastic basically spray
adhesed to the
wood so i'm gonna run an experiment this
is where the experimentation started we
weren't entirely sure
the best way to make
wood into a female mold for our project
and
we decided to try laying down some
plastic with some spray adhesive and
seeing if we could lay up on top of
plastic with the gel coat
kind of suspected this might not work
but it's worth a try before we do the
project
as a whole
this is round two it's a different
experiment i've sealed the wood with a
layer to a polyurethane and then i
painted a couple layers of polyvinyl
alcohol on
and i know this won't react negatively
with the gel coat but i'm just not sure
how easily it'll pull off
of the wood i tried the three different
experiments and the results of the three
they were all informative the first one
is here
this is the one where i use the plastic
underneath and the plastic crinkled up
and it's really nasty
i put i think one layer of 1708 on so i
mean
for gel coat and one layer 1708 it's a
good little uh
it's sturdy but it's really terribly
wrinkly and not useful so the second
experiment was to
use that wood
just kind of as is i didn't they didn't
sand it or anything i just put a layer
of polygon alcohol on it and um
yeah this one worked okay it actually
released fairly easily but um it's hard
to see
it's a little bit grainy and there's a
bunch of little gaps in there so
that one was not bad you know starting
to be something we could work with
and then finally the last one
i sanded the wood
put polyurethane in it sanded it again
and then put a with a fine grit and put
the
polyvinyl alcohol on top of that so now
the wood itself was pretty smooth and
shiny and
you can see some glass popping through
there um there we go it's has almost
inherent shine in it so it's definitely
something we can work with so this is
the strategy we decided to go
put the wood up polyurethane it sand it
apply your thing again sand it again
with and then put the polyvinyl alcohol
on it and this
is where we're going we're probably not
going to get the shiniest of texture
with it but
we will get something with you know kind
of a matte texture but it's very smooth
so this is the ticket the
experimentation works and it's also
encouraging that you know with just one
layer of gel coat and one layer of glass
it's uh
it's nice definitely better than the
canvas
for the hatch we're going to build a
custom hatch cover for it but i do need
to make the cutout now as opposed to
doing it later
so that we can work properly when we do
the fiddles but we'll talk about that
later so here's the hatch it's a decent
size easy to stick your head through
a lot of prep work and this female
wooden mold is kind of brittle so i have
to make sure to walk only where
the underlying metal supports are here
i'm just spraying some cheap black spray
paint from the hardware store just as a
sanding guide
um i know i'm not gonna get this perfect
but i want to get the big lumps out uh
and you know it's like any other boat
project ever there's way more sanding
than you would choose
[Music]
another task we have to do before
putting the fiberglass on is put these
sort of temporary mini fiddles on the
edge that will just kind of hold the
resin and glass from dripping all over
the place all over the sides i want to
kind of make a small cup a small lip
that's going to help contain the glass
from just running over the edges and
making a ton of sharp spikes so here we
have our a few days of working on the
wooden mold i think it looks pretty good
you can see how shiny it is hopefully
that will make it so this doesn't stick
to the fiberglass project because that's
going to be a huge pain
and even though it looks pretty uneven
it's to the touch
smooth
so we have about 25 gallons of polyester
resin and about
three gallons of gel coat
we have about 500 square feet of glass
half of that is three quarter ounce and
matte and the other half of that is
1708 and then we have my coring material
which looks a little thin but i think
it's gonna do the job which is a core
mat it's a matte uh basically a fabric
coring material because
it was cheaper thinner and more easily
accessible the um
solid
poly composite honeycomb cores that you
see they're significantly more expensive
and shipping them they have to be
shipped as like 4x8 sheets which was
also significantly more expensive so
uh yeah we didn't go that route if we
didn't already have the metal frame
which we do and i'm working with then i
would probably have bitten the bullet
and gone with the honeycomb coring but
we already have a metal framework so we
already have some rigidity built in
so i think the core mat will be good
enough our laminating schedule here is
going to be gel coat
a thin layer of top strand a layer 1708
the core mat material 1708 top strand
and gel coat so it's kind of like a
sandwich it's going to be fairly thin
all things considered probably quarter
inch-ish
of a layup but we're not trying to go
for too too heavy here um just the job
it needs to do is let us walk on it
while we're working on the sail hold the
solar panels strongly
and not let the water in and maybe catch
water too uh so but that's that's all it
needs to do it doesn't need to be a half
inch thick of fiberglass to do that job
laying out the polyvan alcohol we
actually brought a compressor because we
thought maybe we could try spraying it
but the thing about where we are in
charleston is that there are
microclimates that exist because of the
water the micro climate was completely
different from the from the forecast of
the area and we just didn't have time it
was either raining or the forecast that
it would be light wind but the
microclimate was making strong winds so
spraying the pva became we tried it it
just didn't work at all we had to roll
it out mixing up the gel coat working in
big batches like this is a little
nerve-wracking because the gel coat's
like 100 a gallon or more and when
you're pouring a quarter of a gallon you
realize that's you know 25 bucks that if
you screw it up it's just down the drain
and if we've never worked with gel coat
in these or resin in these quantities
before so it's definitely
was a learning curve
[Music]
looking back at the footage it seems
crazy that we even tried this given how
strong the wind was blowing but really
again
we couldn't wait around forever we had
to get it done so
yeah here we go
[Music]
[Music]
so
yesterday's projects
i wouldn't call them a disaster
but
is a catastrophe less than a disaster it
was pretty bad
it was it was a mess
so this everything conspired against us
we never
worked on that scale of um you know
square footage before of working with
fiberglass and the wind and the sun and
rookie mistakes and
all that stuff so
today the uh it's the next morning the
glass is mostly cured it's a teeny bit
tacky it's like not super hard so it's
still laminatable which is what it's
meant to do so i stained it off some of
the most egregious bubbles and voids
that we had
and today we're going to get back at it
we're going to do smaller
square footage areas the wind continues
to be a problem
it's nice that we have no rain
but we've had
every day we got 20 knots of wind at
least outside
and it's not
it's not in the forecast for that but uh
it's making everything very difficult
with regard to this laminating process
we're on the day three now day two
oh working outdoors is definitely
been more of an adventure
than we bargained for but we got to get
the project done we can't wait for
perfect weather otherwise it's never
going to get done
so you can see here we're working with
the core material it's called core mat
that we decided to use for this project
and
yeah even this thing was blowing around
like crazy as we were working on it's a
pretty decent product i wish we had
gotten the thicker one i swore i ordered
four millimeters and i got two
millimeters
i
might have just been tired but
i think four millimeters would have
worked better two millimeters worked
pretty decent for what it was you know
working with it is is pretty nice so we
started to get more comfortable with our
pores you can see here we're going with
a full gallon pour of resin which i
would have never thought i would be
doing so let's talk about materials that
we use for this project real quick we
are already planning to do this hard
bimini build and total boat reached out
to us and asked if we were doing
anything that they could send us some
product for and help out with and yeah
we said yes because i've been using
total book products on a number of my
other projects for a while now and i've
been pretty pleased with most everything
you know gave them a small shopping list
and they sent it to us
the only thing is we for this size
project
we really needed a lot of resin i think
we used 35 gallons of resin
resin is a hazardous material to ship in
the united states so it has all these
extra fees for shipping and i was able
there was a local place in charleston i
was able to get
uh 25 gallons of resin from
and i didn't have to pay anything for
shipping because it was local so most
resident we're using here i got from the
local place in charleston but all the
gel coat and the blue resin you see
that's from total vote for this project
we decided to go with polyester resin
instead of usually i go with epoxy for
indoor projects one because epoxy is
stronger but two epoxy doesn't smell
nearly as strong as the polyester resin
does but polyester resin isn't weak it's
a very strong material that's what the
boat's built out of and
it's
a lot cheaper than epoxy and i can
afford buying it in five gallon drums so
since this is gonna be an outside
project through and through we're using
gel coat anyways we've just figured
let's just do it with the polyester
resin another benefit is that the
polyester resin wets out the glass
better than the epoxy resin does and i
we're using 1708 which is a pretty thick
matte of fiberglass
and i'm using that i've used 1708 a lot
with epoxy and it just it does take a
lot more wetting out whereas the the
polyester resin just
blends right into it beautifully so
that's this project and it's it's a
learning
experience for us because we've never
done anything of the scale with this
material
[Music]
now working with the core mat is was
kind of interesting it wets out it sucks
up a lot of resin um they all do it
doesn't suck up as much as you might
think it does
uh and we're starting to get our
technique down here we're pre-wetting
with the resin then we put the material
down then we wet one side flip it over
wet the other side and it gives you a
pretty good working time it kind of
feels like a wet towel afterwards and
like weight and consistency but it's
pretty easy to move around and work with
[Music]
this is the end of day three
got one layer
uh got the entire
layer of the core mat down
and one layer of 1708
end of day four we got
1708 over the entire top
of the bimini now
all right
we're down to the final layer of
fiberglass i'm so excited not to have to
do the big glass layups anymore there's
still lots to do
but if we can get this final layer and
then maybe maybe some gel coat on top of
it
i'm thinking i'm gonna put the glass and
the gel coat and then i'm going to fare
on top of the gel coat basically sand it
down i've got lots of the
waxed gel coat left to use basically get
a white surface that'll be easier
visually to fare out and i'm not even
going for perfect just something that
doesn't look terrible so you can see
here i finally started to get the groove
of how to do this smoothly the wind is
also not crazy strong today which is
very nice and i'm able to i laid all the
three-quarter ounce mat out ahead of
time and just kind of went in one big go
and put the uh
resin in it
okay here's where we're at i spent a
number of hours today
sanding yesterday's gel coat
as you can see
the it's set really really nice and hard
which is part of the reason i did the
gel coat because it uh let the glass
underneath get real hard
and you can see kind of the
seams the overlap on the different
layers of glass that i've sanded out
yeah i'm pretty happy with it and i'm
not going for perfect we might end up
seeing some of these seams
in the finished product but there's
going to be solar panels all up here
anyways you're not going to see
so
all right gel coat one more round see
what we get
starting to look good now you can still
see some of the ridges and creases in
there but it's starting to look kind of
like a legitimate bimini
i haven't shown in the past little bit
because it's just been white on white
it's basically been sanding gel coat on
top of gel coat trying to fare it out i
think one
lesson i learned was
i i used the most recent coat i did was
with thickened gel coat and i spread
that out to fill all the spider web
cracks
of the last layer of matte it worked
really well so i should have done that
sooner uh but
i'm ready for the last layer of gel coat
i'm going to mix it up a little bit
thicker with some colloidal silica and
i'm going to roll it on with a four inch
roller with half inch nap
to try to create a bit of texture i'm
hoping this turns out okay because i
don't this is going to be walked on i
don't want it smooth this is as fair as
i care to get it for the top
it's going to be under solar panels
mostly anyways
uh i did draw a line around it
uh where i started to install the fiddle
so there's no point in putting a
finishing layer of gel coat gel coat
where i'm going to be standing and
putting fiddles anyways so here we go
i know it's this is a line
everything on this side of the line i'm
not going to mess with right now because
i still need to put a fiddle and uh
glass it in
but
that's the degree of fairness you can
see that there's it's not like a bow
hole
but
it's not that bad
and it's really hard so
one last layer of gel coat to cover up
the thin spots that poke through
uh and
we're gonna move on because i really
want to get the uh
mold
the wood
that provided the framework for all this
i want to get that out
but i uh can't do that until i can bolt
this thing down
i can't bolt this thing down
until i get that last layer gel coat
so
let's do it
um so here i'm painting on a little bit
of thickened gel coat with some non-skid
sand mixed into it
and just rolling it on with a rough
finish took a little bit to figure this
out but it worked pretty well all things
considered i was happy with it
[Music]
our top coat is looking very very good
i'm pretty pleased with it
it's difficult to tell because it's all
white on white
maybe you can see a little bit of a
difference here
and the uh this is the part i didn't do
where the fiddles are gonna be glassed
on and this is the
non-skid
i might wait till the sun's going down a
little bit to get you better shadows but
i like it
looks good looks better than i thought
it was gonna look to be honest all right
so this is where we're gonna call this
video done we've got all of the big flat
layup of glass done
but we still have to do the fiddles and
build the hatch so i i would consider us
probably only halfway done at this point
and it's already taken more than a week
to get a week solid of every day working
all day long to get this far
so
yeah it's starting to look good though
it's it's definitely becoming a
legitimate hard pivoting so stay tuned
for the next video where we do all the
finish work get it bolted on get the
fiddles done work on the the custom
hatch for it yeah there's a lot and put
the solar panels back on so thanks for
watching this
see in the next video
uh
ugh