Monday, May 18, 2009

More Landing Gear

I've been working on all the pieces that will attach to the bottom of the boat to protect it. I've pretty much finished the skeg, and the rubbing strips I think I'll finish up today. Once those pieces are installed, the outside of the hull will be ready for paint.


This picture (above) shows the two pieces that make up the skeg being glued together, the bow-block coated with epoxy and down in the distance to the left are the two rubbing strips with their scarphs.




Here you can see the finished skeg sitting approximately where it will eventually be glued down. I made it substantially heavier that the designs called for, and tapered it down to 3/8". Looks pretty handsome, no?

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Bow Block

I carved a nice oak bow block to protect the bottom where it'll hit the beach a lot. It needs a little more shaping and sanding, but I think it looks nice. I also cut strips of oak for the rubbing strips that will go on either side of the bottom. Sorry, no pictures of the strips. Maybe later when I'm putting them on.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Gift Certificate Time

My mom, Susan, bought a fifty dollar gift certificate for Olympia Supply at an auction supporting Safeplace recently. She gave it to me, and the picture below shows the stuff I bought with it.



A bunch of sandpaper of various grit, acetone, nitrile gloves, and a little brush attachment for the shop-vac: $45.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Monday, May 11, 2009

Sanding, Re-Coating, Sanding, Coating Again

After all the excitement of flipping the hull over and seeing the smooth epoxy coating on the bottom, the hard (one might call it tedious) project of fairing the bottom and topsides was a little harder to get into. I (Drew) started right away though, wanting to get it over with and to move along to more interesting tasks.

I've spent a good deal of time sanding and recoating the hull to get it smooth and fair (more or less). This is very time consuming. The first go-round I went over the whole bottom with 80 grit on the belt sander. There were bubbles under the coat of epoxy that I wanted to expose so that the next coat could fill them. The mylar trick was supposed to obviate the need for additional sanding and coats of epoxy, but because of the bubbles I decided to go about the sanding and re-coating process. I think that it needed to happen anyway, because the surface was somewhat uneven and needed fairing. I ended up sanding into the fiberglass in some places because of the bumpiness, and it became much more obvious when the low areas had their sheen and the high areas were all roughed up.

This prepared the bottom for the first (and I had hoped, only) coat of epoxy after the wetting out of the glass. I coated the bottom, hoping to come back and do some sweet finish sanding and be more or less done with it. As mentioned, it didn't really work out that simply.

I hadn't realized how far we were from a smooth, fair bottom. Also, this coat picked up some dust or something and ended up pretty rough. Thankfully when I sanded again I didn't go through the epoxy to the fiberglass except where I was feathering out the glass on the garboards. The feathering looks good by the way. I scraped all the rough spots out with the scraper, then went back over everything with the orbital sander and 80 grit paper. Then I rolled on one more coat of epoxy on, which I think with a sanding to get all the whatevers out will be all we need. I sure hope so, because sanding all this epoxy and glass feels like turning expensive glue into dust (and cancer).

After reading a little more about glassing I learned that all the problems with bubbles and less than perfect transparency can be dealt with by raising the temperature of the epoxy. This makes it thinner, which in turn allows the bubbles to work themselves out before the glue starts to set up.

Apparently 70 degrees is like the absolute minimum for a perfectly clear fiberglass layup. That's probably about where we were when we did ours. Our epoxy consistency was more or less like a thick syrup. This thing I read said that it should be about as thin as water for the best wet-out results. So, on the next boat we need to remember to get the epoxy up to about 85 degrees when we're doing fiberglass so we get better flow. Also, we should spend more time sanding prior to putting anything on. I think everything post-layup would have gone much better if the surface was better smoothed out to begin with.

To say it mildly, I'm super tired of sanding and sweeping and vacuuming, but there's still a lot more cleanup left to do. I've got a hair dryer now to warm up the epoxy in all those fills on the sides. The wood flour mix becomes super hard with the epoxy fully cured (I should have scraped them off when I knew it was the right time, when the glue was still a little elastic), so it's too easy to dig in on either side of the fill. The hair dryer warms and softens so I can scrape the stuff off. Baah!
Well, we're getting there. Soon another part of the boat will be presenting problems of its own.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Flipping Out

This was perhaps the most exciting step so far in the whole process. It didn't involve any real work, just disassembly, and moving the hull off the frame. For the first time we got to see the hull right side up, and yes, it really looks like a real boat. Like it could float us as far north as we might like to go.



Here we are unscrewing the boat from the building frame.



The boat is very light now, without any of the decks, thwarts etc that we'll add later on. Holding it like this takes very little effort at all. This will serve us well when we're hauling it up and down the beach.





Though all the imperfections are clear to the builders it looks good at a glance, and perfectionism was never our intention. Every step that we've put our effort into, however unskilled or hesitant, adds a layer of unique beauty that's specifically tuned to our own (sentimental) eyes.



There's still a lot of work to do, and flipping the boat was a little premature because the hull still needs to be cleaned up. Premature, but oh so necessary. We needed to see this thing stand alone. Now we can call it a boat, and it really is. It's a boat, sitting on its old building frame.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

This is What a Fiberglassed Bottom Looks Like

We were worried, but things turned out all right (like we knew they would). The mirror finish idea was nice, but we weren't going to use it anyway. Painting was always the plan. There were bubbles in the epoxy that needed to be sanded out, but the pictures look pretty awesome anyway, no?