Part 2 of our DIY soft top to hard top bimini conversion. In this video we add the fiddles, hatch and sand and finish the hardtop. We definitely underestimated the level of difficulty adding the fiddles would be. I guess theres a reason you don't see many boats with them! That said, so far, they work really well. Join us as we finish off this 3 month long project!

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Closed Captions by soSAILize:
[Music]
[Music]
but no matter what the country
[Music]
part two of the hard bimini build video
this is the hardest thing we've ever
built on the boat by far as as far as a
single project but it's turning out well
um there was a lot of this that was kind
of outside our comfort zone at the start
but we're getting we're starting to feel
like we're getting a groove going let's
dive into
the second part of the hard bimini build
all right for the fiddles
i have this pvc
trimming and we need to round over the
corners on it so i've built a jig here
with a router blade underneath
and the jig perfectly
fits one of these guys
when it's running
so that i can get reproducible results
every time
[Music]
pretty good
[Music]
and that'll be
the fiddle
so just have a bunch more of those to me
here is my collection of fiddle pieces
and
it's a mess i'm the only one on the boat
jessica's not here the babies aren't
here arya's out front so it turns into a
mess when it's just me getting stuff
done i'm gonna show you what it looks
like it's kind of embarrassing but it's
time to clean up
yep
that's a mess all right let's fix that
so we can move on to the next project
[Music]
so this is what our hardware looks like
we've got these stainless hurricane
bolts everything here is stainless now
it's 304 stainless it's not 316
stainless but it's going to be up on the
bimini where i'm hoping it'll be mostly
rain water
because the 304 stainless doesn't do as
well
with salt water
we'll see i couldn't find any of these
in 316 stainless so
if they rust real bad we might have to
swap them out for something else but i
like them yeah this is the hardware
it'll go around
the poles and i've drilled two pilot
holes already
well more than two i've drilled a number
of pilot holes
so that
we can realign everything once we get
the wood out so the trick now
is to get the wood out this is where i
found the best separation between
the fiberglass and the wood underneath
so we're going to try to exploit this
area and just pry it open bit by bit by
a bit
maybe we'll put some water in there to
help dissolve the pva
and see where that gets us
but i'm gonna have to put you down
it's not that bad it's going that way
oh yeah
i was really worried if this was gonna
work or not but it seems like it's
working look
as i pried up the top and separated from
the wooden bottom i just put little
pieces of wood in to kind of facilitate
the separating with fiberglass from the
wood on that little barrier pineapple
polyvinyl alcohol
[Music]
the fiberglass is meant to be flexible
so you see it flexing here and nothing
about that is alarming to me
i never expected it not to flex
[Music]
it's not lightweight
i mean i calculated the thing it's
probably going to be about 150
to 200 pounds give or take
just based on the amount of
the materials that went into it but
this feels like it
broke my stick
[Music]
and i think i was worried about this
thing
flying away
it's heavy
the goal right now is to
get the wood out and then slide this
back on and there you have it
the mold successfully released
there was a couple spots where the gel
coat
uh stayed behind but i kind of knew that
was gonna happen because it was really
really thin when we laid it up so all
the hard work of making this thing nice
and fair and covering polyurethane so
wooden warp
it's all garbage now because we have the
big piece back there
so it's time to pop this up
yeah i got to remove the screws from the
braces but um
get this out of the way get that back
where it belongs screw it down and call
today
[Music]
so you can see it going on here and it
looks pretty good from the bottom um we
really i really like the feel of the
white top as opposed to the kind of the
grungy
soft top that was there before
[Music]
so i think this is called kerfing where
you cut lots of little dents out of a
piece of wood and it makes it so it can
bend this isn't wood this is the uh pvc
material for the trim but same idea and
it makes a nice curve just gotta took a
little bit of experimentation to make it
so that it wasn't so thin that it broke
or so thick that it made ridges while
the baby's napping jessica helps me a
little bit here two-handed job we just
glued it down with some gorilla glue
glue caulking material just to hold it
in place until we glassed it
[Music]
here i'm putting thickened polyester
resin with uh i think it's thickened
with colloidal silica just to make a
nice turn a nice fillet there and same
thing goes for all around the entire
fiddle all in all this is probably
the single biggest fillet i've done the
whole way around the inside of this
fiddle
[Music]
now our time was starting to run out in
south carolina this project was
happening right uh right near the end of
may beginning of june and we didn't want
to hang out in hurricane season and also
the hot of summer down in charleston so
so we took a pause on the project and
sailed honu north
all the way to new jersey of all places
where we have a friend who owns the same
exact model boat as us another lagoon
410 and has a duck behind his house
where we could stay on the boat and work
on the boat which is like the nicest
setup ever to have a backyard and a dock
for working on your boat yeah we
definitely took him up on that offer
thanks nick but it didn't mean pausing
the project sailing five days north and
resuming the project all right back to
it first things first i went around the
whole underside this is where the little
curve on the mold was and i wanted to
round it over with the router to make it
so that we can apply a couple layers of
glass to the fiddle if we glass the
fiddle itself it's going to make a nice
sort of round over structural component
that will just like kind of the metal
add a lot of rigidity to the bimini
back to the resin we're mixing up here
smaller batches this time but we're
doing strips
of 1708 and the whole the goal is to do
two strips of 1708 to really seal the
fiddles on this part of this project
ended up being a lot more work and a lot
trickier than we expected
one of the things we learned is that the
longer strips of glass like this will
stretch out and you'll get thin spots in
them
so you have to be really careful while
working with them not to pull them out
and get the thin spots
and this was a fairly complex curve up
around over and under
so it didn't go all that well we
definitely had to go back and like redo
pieces of it grind out bubbles fill them
it was a bit of a mess
[Music]
i'm happy with how it turned out in
retrospect i might have chosen to use
instead of 1708 i might have chosen to
use one layer 1708 then a layer of woven
because uh sanding the ridges off of
1708 when all of a sudden it's done was
kind of a lot of work but it turned out
well ultimately
[Music]
we didn't get a lot of footage here but
you can see we took we actually took the
entire bimini off flipped it upside down
which allowed me to work on that
underside ridge the whole way around
because i was the metal framework of the
bimini was preventing me from getting a
good finish from where the glass wrapped
around over the fiddle and down the edge
so we took it off flipped it over
patched up a lot of little holes and
voids and stuff that we had
[Music]
and then while it was there i sanded it
fared it and painted it with the topside
paint to just give a good solid cohesive
finish
this is top side paint and just roll it
out nice and smoothly topside paint is a
little bit tricky to work with and i
wouldn't recommend starting using it on
a big project like this but i've worked
with it previously on a number of inside
projects and i know how to
you know basically go over it give it
some time let the bubbles pop and then
do a very light rolling over that to get
a pretty smooth finish
we put the bimini back on the boat the
bottom side from this point is pretty
much done so we need to finish the
fiddles and that's going to require a
lot of sanding just like any boat
project ever
so what you see here is sanded and fared
the whole way around and you can see
some of the hardware that's holding it
down
[Music]
finishing up the missing spots of the
nuns the thick and gel coat non-skid
mixture as you can see how thick it is
in the barrel here
[Music]
so just roll that on
keep it a little
uh pointy
and uh pretty pleased with how that
worked out
so the last thing to do since the top is
done the bottom is done so next up is
finishing the fiddles
there's the
paint white
for finishing the fiddles instead of
trying to get them really smooth and
shiny with gel coat i'm going to try out
using just a total boats topside paint
i'm a little bit wary our main sheet
lines sometimes rub on our bimini if our
mainsail is way out i'm not sure how
well this is going to hold up the top
side paint to a bunch of line rubbing i
will see but i know that it gives a
really nice finish i can work with it
well doesn't require a bunch of sanding
and it is pretty hard as long as you
apply it thin and wait 24 hours between
coats
[Music]
next up is the hatch cover i built this
out of some remaining quarter inch
plywood and half inch plywood i wanted
to be pretty light i wasn't trying to go
too beefy with this basically the idea
is build something a small light that
fits out of wood and then cover it with
a few thin layers of woven fiberglass
so just routing over the edges so we
have a nice curve for our glass
[Music]
just added two layers of this woven
glass
[Music]
[Applause]
now that the glass is cured on both
sides it's to go around
with a primer one thing that i learned
with this glass though is that you can
get these pinholes and if i was going to
do it again i probably would have gone
over with a fairing compound just to
fill up any little pin holes that
remained with this
kind of cross hatch
uh woven pattern
[Music]
two
brushes hope this stuff cleans up the
fiberglass well
clean up time
cleanup time
so there you have it that's the bimini
[Music]
it's not necessarily 100 percent done
i'll call it 95 to 97 done there's a
little bit of finish work here and there
to finish off but i can do that over
time as we kind of make adjustments to
you know adding more solar panels and
whatnot um
overall walking on it is fine there's a
bit of flex but it works pretty well uh
we still might add a little bit of
vertical support structure underneath to
remove some of that flex but um it's
pretty beefy since we've finished the
project we've been through a couple
storms one tropical storm and one
afternoon storm that came through with
uh 45 knot gusts and it really
hardly moved at all so
i'm really pleased with how strong the
bemidji is i was a little bit worried
you know at first that like hopefully it
doesn't like fly away and just tear off
the boat when these storms come through
but given how little it reacted to 45
knots of wind i'm pretty pleased that
it's a permanent part of the boat and it
didn't leak there's no leaks uh i was a
little bit worried about that too with
all the through bolts that we have going
but we sealed them well enough and um so
far no leaks no rust no no no problems
another project that we have
that'll happen down the road is we want
to utilize the rain catchment system so
we're going to build rain catchment for
this
and already the little gutters that we
have when it rains a ton of water comes
out of this so the rain catching works
well we're just not harvesting it
so that's a little system we have to
build but that'll be a separate thing
would be great because when we're in
places and it rains we don't have to run
the water maker or if we're in places
like
the southeast south carolina florida
where it rains daily uh yeah we don't
have to worry about the water maker at
all so that's our hard bimini that's how
we did it i'm pleased with it and
honestly i think it's one of the better
you know aftermarket hard biminis that
i've seen so thanks to totalboat for
helping us with some of the product we
use in this video thanks for watching
see in the next video
you gotta clean up your mess
clean right here
glad this stuff comes off
all right