Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Preparing the Bottom

Last week I planned in the underside profile for the rub rail.  I didn't mill the rub rails as precisely as I should have.  I figured it would be easier to trim them up in place.  The job turned out to be too much for my belt sander so I resorted to planning them down.  This worked very well but was time consuming and uncomfortable since the rail sits too low to stand and plane and working on my knees without kneed pads is a form of torture.

Spent last night filling holes and cleaning up the keelson to keel joint in preparation for fiberglassing.  Only task left before I add fiberglass to the bottom is to create the "giant" fillet between the keelson and the keel.  Lost about 10lbs in sweat.

It's getting hot here in Florida (imagine that) and I'm going to have to tackle this at night when it's cooler.  Otherwise, the pot life of the epoxy really suffers even when I'm using slow hardener.  The same is true for when I go to 'glass it.  I've already bought a bunch of roller tray liners so that I can spread the epoxy out and get more pot time out of it.

Hours this session: 16
Hours total: 518

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Flip It!


Last saturday I gathered up some of my karate students and some friends from work for the highly anticipated roll over.  It had been raining on and off here in central Florida for about a week and still drizzling at the designated hour.


The tires that I left outside to be used as cushions for the turning were full of water.  It's a little bit of an engineering problem to figure out how to get all the water out from the inside of an old tire.  We ended up throwing them around until they were empty.



We decided to try to turn it in place.  First we pushed it as far as we could to one side of the garage



Some strategically place tires and were were ready to go.  


Rolling...


Rolling...


Rolling...

Rolling...

We stop on the side long enough to remove the building cradle.


Since we didn't have enough room to roll the boat completely over we stopped at this point and slid the boat back over to one side of the garage before continuing the roll.




Reposition the tires...


... and continued the roll over.


Settling it down on the tires.






Done!!!


Get everything back out of the rain an into the garage.


 And it is done.


 Total time 1/2 hour.

It was actually much easier than I had imagined.  We had 5 adults but probably could have done it with less.

Since the roll I've been working on cleaning up the underside of the rub rails and getting them to their final shape.  I haven't leveled the hull yet I think I'm going to use jack stands at the rear to get the height right.

I'm adding in some odds and ends time to account for glassing the rudder, drilling drain holes, filling the weave on the companionway assembly, etc.  It's all looking pretty good.


Hours this session: 12
Hours total: 502