One thing to note about this build - my taped fillets are all less then stellar.
This is essentially a problem of time. In order to get a taped fillet to look good, you really need to break it down into several steps:
- fill in the fillet, get it nice and smooth
- wait for it to setup (at least 12 hours, likely 24)
- cleanup the fillet slightly with sandpaper if there are any rough edges (you won’t really need to roughen up the fillet itself since, as long as you apply the tape within 72 hours, you’ll still get a chemical bond if you’re using system 3 resins)
- apply the tape on the hardened fillet and fill the weave with epoxy
What I did was to lay down the fillet, and then immediately put the tape down on top of it and fill the weave with epoxy. The problem with doing that is the fillet doesn’t stay uniform and smooth as you apply the tape and wet it out. So it’ll cure kind of bumpy, and there’s no way you can fix this via sanding since if you tried you’d sand right through the tape and ruin the structural strength of the bond.
I could fix this by applying even more epoxy on top of the cured taped fillets, but I’m not going to worry about it - so far all of my taped fillets won’t be visible without opening up a storage locker or two, and so I’m fine with that. Don’t judge a boat by the fillets hidden away in a storage locker :)
Note that this is a cosmetic issue only - they’re all still plenty strong. Indeed adding more epoxy on top of the tape to smooth it out wouldn’t be structural at all, that’d be purely cosmetic, and given the cost of epoxy likely not worth it.
