July 15: The Epoxy Dam Be Damned Disaster

After the planing was completed, the manual says it is time to pour the optional epoxy dams in the bow and stern. These are reinforcing bodies of epoxy that help harden the ends and protect a boat from doom and destruction. We opted to include the epoxy dams in our boat. After all, how simple is it to construct a cardboard barrier in the very tip, seal it with tape, and fill the cavity thus formed with unthickened epoxy? We grew bold and giddy as I quickly rendered custom-fitting cardboard levees to hold the epoxy in place while it hardened. The choice to use duct tape (rather than the clear package tape we had used throught the project up to this point) seemed like a very logical move.
If this were a movie, the music would grow ominous while the camera zoomed in on the duct tape.
Everything was going fine. The clever dyslexic left-handed carpenter mixed up the epoxy and poured it carefully into the space we had created in the nose of our craft. The first batch only filled about a third of the cavity so he proceeded to mix up a second batch.
At that point, things began to unravel ... just as he discovered, mid-squirt, that there was no more resin in Jug #1 I discovered that the levee in the nose had failed and epoxy was spreading into the rest of the fore section of the boat. Meanwhile, he was trying to change out the empty jug of resin for the new jug and resin was going everywhere - on him, the floor, various tools, etc. He had to remove his gloves because they had also filled with resin and guess what! The box of ten thousand gloves we purchased at the start of the project had only one more glove in it! At the nose of the boat, I was madly cramming newspaper in, trying to shore up the failed levee and stop the flood of epoxy. It was an all-out disaster!
We finally managed to think clearly enough to tip the thing up on end so gravity could be our friend. We have removed the goo from ourselves and the tools and all but this was, all-in-all, a tough day at the boat shop. We are hoping that the damn epoxy dam hardens decently. If all else fails, we may want to use this thing as an icebreaker.