Forward 'glassing the hulls, part 3

I almost skipped work in the garage tonight but my wife insisted I make some progress before going to bed.  Why?  Because it makes me happy when I'm done.  I didn't mention that I am decidedly not happy while I'm doing it but I had to agree that progress is good.  Lack of progress is bad.  At least, lack of progress is bad towards finishing the boat, but not so bad if it's watching a good TV show or a sports thing.  Any sports thing these days.

I first cleaned up from the prior night's work and noticed this little gem:  a cup, melted from the middle down.  Keen readers will note that I made a mess of the 'glass up a couple nights ago partly because the epoxy got hot in my hand so I had to put it down.  Little did I know that I might've lost a hand (or a house) to fire.

 

 

Joking aside, this really shouldn't happen.  I've epoxy'd in warmer weather before, but it's never done this.  And this is supposed to be the "slow" acting stuff.  Note to self:  work faster, with smaller amounts, else up your insurance plan.   I'm glad this was on the concrete floor of the garage and not near something more sensitive to heat.

With that set aside, I went about the usual business of measuring out the layup, frog tape, and identifying those areas I needed to redo for whatever reason, like this area of the hull where I was short about six inches the other day.  In a few hours, no one will be the wiser!

 

And here is that triangular area near the keel nose, which still remains largely epoxy free as I figure out how to deal with it.

 

The main part went pretty well, all things considered, and as far as I know there are no fires in the garage tonight.

Here is a view of the other side of the keel getting its second layer of 'glass.

  

I should be able to tackle the remaining bow area tomorrow and the area behind it the day after that.  But port is now done end-to-end once that little patch cures.  This means I can lay down the reinforcement 'glass along the chine and the keel on that side of the hull.

Big Glass Is No Fun

Today was some of the hardest fiberglass work I've had to deal with, and not just because it's been awhile since I've done it, but because it's a massive project with very delicate parts thrown in for good measure.

Let's start with a failed math project:  this is a 16' boat, shorter because of the curves and rakes, but let's call it 16'.  Each of the fiberglass large rolls is 4' across.  That means 4 sheets across should cover the hull if they don't overlap.  However, since the waterline is actually closer to 14', not 16', there should be plenty of 'glass to spare to overlap using the width-wise 'glassup instead of the lengthwise 'glassup.  Not so.

After carefully measuring everything, I tossed about 6 feet of glass over the top and laid it out as best I could in a dry fit.  This is a critical part of any 'glasswork and can save a lot of time later.  Once the dry fit is set, the frogtape goes down and I have a general outline of the wet out for this part.

 
But as I mentioned at the outset, here you can see I fell short about 6 inches; my thumb is where I wanted this to end, not where it actually ends.  The right half of this photo is the bow section.  I think this happened because I had too much waste at the transom, and then too much overlap in the second layup from the stern.  In any case, this will need a strip of 'glass and some treatment before I can "fill the weave."

It's not the end of the world, of course, but it does set things back at least a few hours and probably a day as the new application needs to set and cure and get feathered back in seamlessly.  But at least I know how to do that.

The other side looks like this.  Careful darts seemed to make this fit OK, except for the trianglar gap at the base of the keelnose block.

Annoying but fixable after this cures, just like I'll do at the bow.  I could leave it as is but I want a double layer here that extends least six inches from the centerline.  Like the other high-impact areas, this will also get a layer of 6oz fiberglass for a total of 3 layers.

Here are some examples of "fixes" where either I had to sand down to the wood again because I missed some epoxy bump, or just mis-measured and didn't extend the 'glass all the way aft.

After an exhausting couple hours fighting the 90 degrees and humidity, I got the hull done.  Looks good from these angles --

  -- but don't look at the other side.

This was.. how shall I say this delicately.. a complete sh&tstorm.  Things started OK, and then suddenly went awry.  At one point, the epoxy was so hot in my gloved hand I had to put it down.  The MAS epoxy stuff I have is supposed to be slow curing but I guess the air temperature accelerated everything.  This meant I had to go back and mix up some more quickly, and in rushing to get off the step, I spilled a bit down the hull, now forever marked by a dark river of hot epoxy.

And then for whatever reason I could not get the 'glass darts on the top of the keelnose block to take epoxy and lay flat.  It was like some cartoon kid stuck his finger in a socket and his hair shoots up.  Defeated, I did the best I could do straighten out the rest of the block except the very top.

So this, too, will need to be sanded flush, and then a smaller cut of 'glass will wet this down.  I'm not looking forward to doing this all over again on the other side, but I guess if I want to finish the boat, I don't have much of a choice.

On a Roll

I felt a bit on a roll tonight and couldn't really stop. I'd been staging the laminations and blocking so that they'd all be ready at the same time. Not sure that was the best technique because suddenly I was overwhelmed with blocking from all angles, much like Adrian Peterson would see when running up the middle. I have a small basement shop that's getting smaller by the day. Since I never got around to building the flip top table(s), my power tools sit on the floor until ready. That means lifting the bandsaw up on the workbench and putting it back down when done, all 75 lbs of it.

Neat view of centerboard in centerboard trunk. Not sure I've seen a photo like this. I was dry fitting to see if my fillets would get in the way; they don't.

That experience was uniquely offset by hand planing. Just about every woodworker I know loves hand planing. The rhythmn, the smell, the progress, the smoothness. It really is therapeutic. Exhausting, but therapeutic, especially after sanding-sanding-sanding down all the squeeze out from my mediocre epoxy work over the last couple days. Planing was followed by the random orbital then 120 grit on a sanding block. It's about as good as I can make it. The manual says the block will churn through thousands of miles of water. God, I hope so!

Planing. It's what's for dinner.

Getting the keel nose block down to form.

I had a surprise visitor today. Chris stopped by with 50 lb of tire weights so I can do my lead pour this weekend! Chris is awesome. He had his whole family in the car, heading up to a huge hobby store near my house. I'm sure they were all thinking, "For Pete's sake, he just got done building the damn boat. Now he's gonna basically build another one?" Nice people, that group. Too bad I was covered in sawdust from planing the nose.

The trouble is, I don't like to spend money where I can avoid it. There's 'clean' lead and there's 'dirty' lead. Dirty lead comes in the form of the tire weights that have a lot of waste materials with it, such as the 50lb bucket here.
 

Yay Chris!!

Clean lead can be bought from eBay for about $1.20 a pound, including shipping, which requires much less work, but of course is more expensive than free.

Boo ebay!!

However, given how much trouble I've had calling tire shops, this might actually be the only route I have available. Two Tires Plus and two Good Year shops near the house both would not/could not sell me their weights. Oh well.. in the scheme of things, not a big deal. Just not expected, which I should expect to happen more and more.

Stops and Starts

Nose block pattern with 8' pine.

I had the nose block pattern with me while rummaging through the garage looking for the aft part of the keel when I looked up and saw two of the remaining planks of pine looming over my head. I used the first one to laminate the nose block itself, which was curing as I was moving on to the keel blocking. From plank to nose block in two days; that's pretty cool. I suppose I'll have many of those epiphanies over the next couple years, but it just reinforces the feeling that I don't think there's much better than sailing a boat built largely by your own hands

Unfortunately, at this rate, I'll be sailing in 2017, because it doesn't feel like I've gotten very far. I've been warned not to compare the rate of my build against other people's, but it's hard not to compare. By now, 2 weeks after receiving their kits, some builders got their hulls together (not counting the German fisherman who basically lied his way to page 200 in a day).

But it's still progress nonetheless. Chris lent me his plans so I was able to finally make the keel blocking to spec, at least the lamination part. I'll cut it to the pattern on the band saw tomorrow night. One thing that confused me a bit was where the vertical plank goes. It's about 8 inches long and sits roughly in the middle of the longer pattern part. but it's not clear exactly where it goes. Turns out it forms the butt joint for the aft and bow parts of the keel, about 1 inch on either side. With that puzzle settled, I glued up the centerboard itself, putting a few weights on top to ensure a good fit.

How many laminations do you see?

I'll add some commentary here about what can possibly go wrong with the keel build. PocketShip blog addicts may have noticed that a common problem is that the keel is often built crooked. There are two possible causes. The first is the keel is tapered so that if it cures without support, it will sag. The second is that the pattern has a LOT of play in it. It's supposed to start dead center and end dead center. Not carefully marking these centerpoints on the pattern when transferring it to the blank can easily put things out of whack, e.g. crooked. So between ensuring that the keel sits flush while curing and properly transferring the pattern (there's a novel idea!) there's quite a bit to look out for when putting this together.

I did make a mistake on the centerboard trunk, however, over the weekend. I laid down a strip of frog tape (as seen in an earlier post) but forgot to peel it off before the epoxy cured. That meant the frog tape + epoxy is now a permanent part of the boat. I tried really hard to scrape, cut, and sand it out and tried to dissolve a little with acetone, but eventually gave up as I started getting into the fiberglass itself. The one thing I didn't try was heat, but I didn't want to weaken these important joints. If I cut my own patterns, I would've cut them again. Alas, I'm resigned to sailing with frog tape in there. I'm hoping the frog tape doesn't destablize the joint. Liberal amounts of thickened epoxy applied like a fillet covered it up nicely. It should stay clear of the centerboard but I'm not happy it happened. I'll do a test of the centerboard once it's all built to make sure the board can move up and down easily.

Fillets over frogtape.

On the other hand, that's a pretty sweet fillet right there. Tomorrow I'll finish the "box" and be done with three pages of the manual. Then I'll try not to mess up my nose block blank which puts me on track to do a lead pour as soon as I can get some lead. Progress feels good!  (four laminations in the photo, btw -- long keel blocking, vertical keel blocking, nose blank, and centerboard)