Some advise you to dive right into the first real chapter, but I wanted to proceed with the confidence layups for three reasons:
1. I wanted to show them to family members.
2. The plans say the flat layup (six plies of BID) can be useful later, and I believe them (grin)
3. My first few feet of the BID were warped beyond my satisfaction for actual use, despite the ability to reshape BID. This gets them out of the way.

I'm glad I did. My epoxy effort only wet out the first three layers of the BID because (hardy har har) I tried doing all six at once. Oops. I also had problems with the epoxy setting up too quickly - I was using Fast hardener to test for this very thing. Slow is probably too much in the wrong direction - I only needed another 5-10 minutes. I will probably mix Fast and Slow in the future - this is allowed for MGS. I will try again tomorrow, this time with more epoxy and wetting out each layer one at a time.

I am now using a roughly 30/70 mix of Fast and Slow. Since I am measuring by weight, my process is not rocket science. I place an empty cup on my scale and zero it. Then I fill the cup with as much resin as I think I want, by eye, allowing for the fact that hardener will join it. I weigh this, and look on my chart for the closest matching weight, then add a drop or two of resin if I'm not on an exact number. The chart gives me a final weight with the hardener, so I then just add equal squirts of each type of hardener in the ratio I want until I reach the target weight. I can get 1 drop at a time out of the pumps if I'm careful, or accuracy to a third of a gram (one drop's weight) in the entire batch.

This is a really easy and fast method of measuring out epoxy. If I want it to cure a bit faster, I lean more (or all the way) toward Fast hardener, and vice versa for more setup time. And there's basically no cleanup involved - the pumps don't drip or leak, and if they get gunked up over time I'll just replace them. The only drawback is that my scale only goes up to 500g, or about 17.6 ounces. That's about a medium cup full of resin - a 16 fl. oz. cup would contain more than the scale could measure. This is OK with me - I don't intend to work with that much at a time anyway, for fear of exotherms. I would rather mix 2-3 smaller cups to get the desired quantity.

My flat layup turned out to be 10.5 ounces, which is on the lighter side. I don't attribute this to an excellent layup but rather to the higher amount of tiny bubbles present. I don't really have any large air bubbles to speak of. However, I did have a large number of tiny bubbles that none of the pictures show well. There's enough there to be a concern (15% or so, I'd say) but the opacity isn't all from that - I peel-ply'd one side and that's the cause of the milkiness.

I also have some fabric dings I made with the squeegee while doing the layup, and some embedded aluminum foil bits and streaks on the back side where epoxy crept underneath the gap between my two sheets of foil (I laid foil over the plastic on my bench to see how well it peeled). None of these issues justify doing this layup over again. In the future, I will focus on my stirring technique for the epoxy mixing step. I believe this is where the tiny bubbles were introduced. Also, I have rounded the corners on my squeegee to prevent them from catching the fabric. Finally, I'll only use plastic instead of foil.