Composting head

Starting to build my own composting head for the boat. Easy enough to buy one, but they are upwards of $1000, if I include shipping. I had some less than optimal 34 oz. triax fiberglass in stock so cut three layers of that and wrapped them around a bin to shape the front of the head. Then I'll use plywood sides, bottom, and top. I have some composite (thin luan and foam) I could use for the top or bottom to save a bit more weight. Here's progress so far:

Glassing the rudders

Turned out that those glue lines in the foam laminations for the rudders proved troublesome. When fairing the blades, it was just too difficult to not sand too much of the softer foam either side of glue lines. I would recommend going for full thickness foam so one wouldn't have to have glue lines - if doing something similar to this.

So what that means is I had to do some fairing after I got the fiberglass skin on. Following are some pics of that process.

Here are the supplies: Triaxial fiberglass (has a diagonal manufacturing defect, plus some unfortunate foldes that caused a bit more fairing afterward), some peel ply, some release film, and breather cloth.

Here it is (the glass) draped over the blade dry. I was just fitting it. I epoxied it up on a table and then worked it onto the blade wet after this pic:

Here it is vacuum bagged up:

And Ta-Dahh!:

That pic above shows how I cut back the foam on the trailing edge so the two sides of glass would bond together well. That area was then faired with structural bog. I also had some small wrinkles on the leading edge so had to correct that with some layers of lighter cloth.

Then a layer of bog to fair the blade:

And sanded down:

Then I wanted to square the top end to the kickup rudder cassette so had to use some bog and a piece of mylar to separate the cassette and blade:

Then a couple coats of epoxy and next step will be some sanding, then primer and paint.