More little stuff
More little stuff
Compression post support. Sadly the picture came out blurry. But, if you look close you can see how the glass is layered from thick at the bottom to thin at the top. This is to match up with the loads this part has to absorb. This part sits between bulkhead #2 & #3. The compression post sits at the aft end of this support. Therefor the forward end has really very little load on it.
And the mold goes back in line for the next part.
Second set of chain plate backing brackets being shot.
Gavin is finding that boat building is not glamorous at all! Its nasty, stinky, sticky and scratchy. I think he’s going to be very happy to go off to college after Christmas break.
Keel spar #2 getting its plumbing put into place. The green is flow media.
Tim making up rudder skins. He decided to to try gel-coating them white to begin with. Usually this stuff we do in clear. The hope was that the white undercoat would help with the the final finish steps.
We’ll see..
Just like the compression post support, we layer the glass and taper it off to match the loading of the part. The head of the rudder has around 9 layers of glass whereas the tip is down to 3.
And, although the photo here’s not good enough to show it, each layer is staggered by 45 degrees. Meaning the layers go 0-90,45-45,0-90,45-45 etc..
The wood showed up, so woodworking could start pretty soon. Boat parts like electronics and hardware are beginning to trickle in. The hope is to start building up the electrical subassemblies pretty soon as well. Geoff tells me he wants to help out ( The guy that borrows Dart #1 all the time. ) I may train him up to do electrical assembly. He would probably be pretty good at it.
Lost a couple days last week due to the shop’s computer dying in a power surge. Now I have a fancy new iMac. But of course there are teething pains with this. My database software is too old to run correctly with this machine, so its upgrade time. Ouch!
That’s the story today.
Sunday, December 9, 2012