Sea Hood continued

 The sea hood construction was covered in July's 2024 post named "Companionway Hood".

I still had a bit of work to finish the sea hood before installing the solar panel.

The first job was to plug the screw holes. I made 6mm diam plugs from blue gum and epoxied them in place.

I gave the epoxy glueing in the plugs a couple of days to set hard before cleaning up and sanding down smooth. 

BUT I had no fiberglass cloth in stock so it's off to the local marine store.

 With a newly purchased roll of 6oz/200gms of fiberglass cloth I glassed the top of the sea hood and covered it with peel ply. On a side note, I also purchased a cast iron frying pan (seen on bench in pic), it will not only cook meat & fish to perfection (in my opinion) but when stored under the floorboards will provide ballast....bloody bargain haha.

Preparation of tabbing cloth and peel ply for all the underside fillets. This will strengthen the sea hood.

Fillets applied in all corners, fibreglass tabbing cloth and peel ply applied while all resin still wet. 

With three coats of epoxy with non-yellowing hardener the sea hood is ready for lacquer.

Same with the slide, ready for lacquer.

Solar Panel on Sea Hood

 The local RTM store (Road Tech Marine) had solar panels on sale. I really wanted to install a flexible panel but found it difficult to get one that would fit neatly on the sea hood. The panel I chose was a solid aluminum framed panel.

It was a 12V, 40W Monocrystalline Panel with 4mm (MC4) PV. Connectors. It measured 664mm length x 408mm wide x 25mm height, I intend to connect it through a DCC charger with a built in MPPS solar regulator.

To fix the straight panel to the curved sea hood top I pop riveted 2 x 90 degree aluminum angles together as shown in the pic and screwed them to the underside of the panel.

 The bases of the angles were bent to conform to the sea hood.

After centering the panel, I marked the screw hole's location on the sea hood.

Before securing the panel to the sea hood I need to plug some holes and glass the top see next post.