Sunday, September 02, 2001 Today I put the bases on the frames for the pods, and began laying the fiberglass on them. This is not as easy as it looks. It is very tricky to handle the fiberglass cloth when it has resin all over it. The resin sticks to everything. I made some mistakes, and will share them all. If you are gonna try to make some like this, make sure you have lots of rubber gloves. I probably used 8 pair today because they get so sticky that you can't cut the fiberglass cloth or do anything. So, you have to take them off, and get a new pair. It can help to have two people, so one person can do the "dirty" part and the other can keep their hands clean for cutting the cloth, mixing the resin, etc. Fortunately, Tina (my girlfriend) helped me out. She is also the photographer and webmaster for this entire project. I can't thank her enough! First thing I did after I put the bases on the frames is I put foil in the gaps of the frames, and backed it up with crumpled paper. This gave me something I could spread the first layer of fiberglass against. I made the mistake of trying to put foil on the baffle portion of the pod in hopes of preventing fiberglass from getting on the area that the speaker would eventually mount to (that's why I am tracing around the upside-down speaker in one of the pictures). I figured that the fiberglass might make an uneven surface. I was wrong. Instead, the foil made it worse because it made even more lumps on top of which the fiberglass stuck. Plus, the foil got trapped under the fiberglass. This means the fiberglass doesn't have as good of a bond to the wood as it probably should. I think it will be ok, but I definitely didn't try that on the other side. Turns out that the other side has a much flatter surface with just the fiberglass over the wood, and I think this will work out just fine. The second mistake is that I tried to reinforce the first layer of fiberglass from the inside with resin and fiberglass mat. I wedged the mat at the base, and tried pouring resin over it. But, either I didn't have enough resin or the resin just isn't thin enough to spread itself around the mat. Even when I tried to spread it, I couldn't get in there good enough to make it stick well. I won't do that again. I plan on putting two layers of fiberglass cloth. I got two layers on one of the pods, and will hopefully finish fiberglassing the other one tomorrow.