Fiberglass fish bin construction

A guy doing fiberglass has got to eat. A boat came in selling fresh shrimp. I made shrimp poor boys with jalapeno coleslaw!

 

I have most of the deck cut out now. I'm working on the problem of what to do with the hydraulic lines that go around the port front corner.
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After a month long vacation I'm back working on my fish bin project. I've been grinding and grinding. I think I found a large repair that was done with epoxy. It smells like epoxy when grinding. I have not budgeted the money to do the whole fish bin project using epoxy resin so I am looking at a product called SB-112 which is part of the
West System. It is suppose to go over epoxy and create a surface that can adhere to polyester resin. If anyone reading this has ever used SB-112 please tell me how it works. Thanks.

 

Making patterns

I have finished the majority of the grinding. I have a lot of dust to clean up but I am on to making patterns for the bin partitions. Here is a picture of the cardboard pattern.

 

cutting the Canacore

I used my cardboard pattern to cut the canacore. A very sharp knife cut it quite easily. My cardboard pattern was accurate enough to use on both the starboard and port partitions. Here is a picture of my first piece.

 

Lay up Tent

I tried laying up one of my panels using polyester resin in my garage. My garage is under my living room and the odor came right through and fill the house with fiberglass smell. It was awful. I decided that I had to work outside so I cleared out a space in a side yard and put up a tent. I'm finishing it today and giving it a test.

 

Hello there. replying from maine, home of the largest lobster boat fleet in the universe. All these guy's build bait boxes, fish boxes and live tanks with plywood and poly ester or vinyl ester resin. I mean hundreds of them! I've built a few myself and know them to be good and rugged and budget minded. The plywood is always A.C. fir or fir underlayment, not home depot or lowes. Make sure it is fir plywood with exterior glue. Put the boxes together with stainless deck screws PL premium glue. Then radius the out side corners and fillet the inside ones. They usually lay on 2 to3 layers of 3\4 ounce mat inside and out. Make sure you do a primer coat of resin first and don't add any wax to the resin. Let the primer coat get a bit sticky before proceeding with the matt. Simple,fast,easy and makes the budget. No really, most of these guys use plywood and glass, that's it, proven over and over. Keep it it simple, hopes this helps you........g

 

Hi George. Thank you for the input. I did a lot of research on plywood vrs canacore and came to the conclusion that I wanted to try canacore. I have done quite a bit of fiberglass over plywood. I redid the whole stern deck on my first gillnetter in Bristol Bay 15 yrs ago and it is still holding up. Since my son is using slush ice to cool the salmon we decided that the insulation properties of the hollow honeycomb would be much higher than plywood covered in fiberglass cloth and resin. The fishery ramps up and down and being able to put slush in a couple bins early and late in the season makes sense to us. However as you have noted lots and lots of boats here in Southeast Alaska have made their fish bins out of plywood and fiberglass.

 

Adding Panels

The lay up tent I attached to the side of my house works great. I lay up the panels in the cold and then turn on the heater. It gets nice and warm in minutes and they fire off in about three hours. I have put the starboard longitudinal panel in place and glassed it in. I used bondo for the filet and three layers of fiberglass cloth in each joint to hold it in place. I mixed the bondo and put it in a quart size ziplock baggie. I cut off one corner and used it like a pastry bag. I piped it into the corner and rounded it using a tongue depressor.

 

Bondo on edges

I forgot to mention that on the panels I filled the edges with bondo before glassing them into place. This was done to help to keep out water.

 

I have not been doing a very good job of keeping up with this thread. My son has been home for Christmas break and we have been working together. It is much easier to have a helper. We are both learning a lot. There was so much going on that I just didn't have time to keep up with my thread. We now have five panels in place. We figured out how to make the curved panels to match the shape of the hull. We cut a piece of plywood about 8" wide that fit tightly between the middle longitudinal panel and the outside hull. We then cut pieces of cardboard to match the shape of the panel and stapled them to the plywood. We then used hot glue to add pieces of cardboard to exactly match the hull. We used a small block of wood with a fine point marker held on top of it to trace the hull shape to the cardboard piece before we glued it on.

 

Panels

Here are a couple pictures of the starboard stern panel. This boat was originally a seiner and the fish hold went back partly under the stern deck. We didn't want to deal with tearing up the whole stern so we turned the small amount of space into storage. It was quite a pain to get in behind the panel to fair it and add the fiberglass strips. I was glad my son was helping me. He did most of the work in the confined space. We used a fan to add fresh air as well as wearing respiratory masks

You might notice that we switched to a different filler. It's the blue-green material around the panel. It is suppose to be better than bondo. It is billed as water proof. It is sold by NAPA Auto and is called Fiber Lay. It is a lot more expensive but works well.

We used three layers of 6 ounce cloth to attach the panels to the hull. The first was a 10" wide strip followed by an 8" and then a 6"

 

First Bin

We have now added one of our perpendicular panels forming the shape of the first bin. Our panel fit great with only about two minutes of grinding to get it to slip in.
We ordered six new brailers to match the shape of the bin. We got a small Fish Expo discount by ordering them before Christmas.

 

We plugged up two drain holes through the stringers into the shaft alley. Each fish bin will be water tight and will use slush ice to keep the fish cold. The 1" cannacore will help insulate the ice. The temperature has dropped into the 20's and that has slowed our progress but we are moving forward. My son goes back to school today so I will be on my own again.

 

All Large Panels in place

I have finished glassing in the large panels for the outside bins. On each side of the panel I used a 10" wide strip of 6 oz cloth followed by an 8" wide followed by a 6" wide. I used vinyl-ester resin on all existing surfaces and poly-ester on the end where it met the longitudinal panel I made.