Thursday, February 7, 2008

Moving right along

Yesterday was one of those days where the visible progress is low but there was quite a bit of progress.

First off I went and found the right size zip ties. I had big ones and little ones and I needed the medium ones. If you go to the store looking you need the size that holds 45lbs the ones I got are 6 inches. The 75lb 8 inch size is too big and there is a 4” size that is too weak.

My son and I had already marked all of the places to drill holes for the ties so I just needed to drill the holes. I believe I already mentioned that a friend told me to drill the holes before epoxying the strips together so I would only need to drill 5 sets of holes instead of 10. That was a big time savings. I made a little jig for drilling that made sure all of the holes were perfectly vertical. It also makes sure that all of the holes are the same distance from the edge and will be covered by the fiberglass tape. It is just a block of wood with a large hole for seeing the line to align the jig with and a small hole to put the drill bit in.




Then on the underside a small block of wood is attached to line up with the edge of the plywood.






I had done a test piece to be sure the epoxy worked the night before which it did. So all that was left was to line up some panels and epoxy them.





The first thing I did was rearrange my shop. I put the table saw against the wall and moved the workbench which is on wheels out to the middle of the shop. It is 8 feet long so using that and some roller stands gave me a good workspace. My shop is only 24 feet long so leaving room for the door on one end and the band saw on the other end there was not much extra space.

I was surprised how hard it was to get everything clamped and straight. It took about ½ hour and 2 beers to get 4 pairs clamped up. Finally everything was straight and I put on the epoxy. 1 pump from each container was about perfect to do 4 seams. I put it on rather thick so I could sand it later.











Tonight I hope to epoxy some more and maybe draw out the shape of the forms that go inside the boat during construction. I may not have time though.


One last item, I sent an email to Fisher with a question about whether I need to put fiberglass inside and out or just inside an was impressed to get a response in just a few hours. They have been great to deal with in every way. Remember they are thousands of miles and an ocean away from me but are as helpful as if they lived around the corner.

I love the internet.







I usually tape both sides of the centreline seam. The bow and stern l use a large epoxy fillet on the inside and tape the outside. the other chine seams l tape the inside and simply fill the outside with thickened epoxy.
Regards,
Paul Fisher
SFDesign



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