terça-feira, 30 de abril de 2013

Keeping up the rythm !

Al four beam mounts are now in place and ready for final lamination.
 

Aft beam molds in place and first fillets on and curing.
This was very time consuming. After following plan procedures wasn't happy with the outcome so trashed it and did it my way. Basically the same principal but much easier to set up and align ( I hope). Instead of using a partitioned panel I used a single plywood board. This way the surface is kept straight all around. The negative inner mold part ( hope to show later) should be easy to remove.

MVT ( Most valuable tool).
Decided to throw in some tips and good ideas that worked for me.
This one is a mixing spatula. Nearly life time reusable! No need to discard wooden mixing sticks.
Just used a broken hacksaw blade, a wooden stub and heatshrink sleeve. The blade has the perfect flexibility for mixing resin and putty ( even heavy putty) and its easely cleaned, sanded if necessary and ready for the next batch. Try it !

sábado, 20 de abril de 2013

Full steam!

The long awaited good weather has finnaly set in. I've been working so intensively that it becomes hard to find time to update the blog. Today I probably put over 10h on the project!
 
Just to keep you posted here are two photos of the latest work. It doesn't seem much but there's a lot of hours into them. Despite the good weather, temperatures are still mostly  under 20ºC and cool overnights and that slows down resin curing times. Normally I laminate or apply putty on one day , sand the next day and repeat the routine.
 
 
Front beam mounts are locked in place. Next come the mold plates, the remaining UD's ( miles of them!) and interior and exterior lamination. Still many hours to go on these.
 
 
 
Today just prepared the aft beam mounts ready for putty filling tomorrow. Photo was taken with the mobile phone and is not very sharp.
 
 
So far levels and aligments seem to be ok despite the need to tweek a bit with the portside aft beam. I guess the large fillets used to fix the mount ended up pulling the part about 12 mm aft.
 
Next week should be shopping for two component polyurethane to start painting some of the compartments at the bow area that will be hard to access once starboard panels are glued in place.
 
Looks like the good weather is going to hold on for the comming days so I'm looking forward for significant progress on the project.