2006 building logs

Feb 2006 Preparing port hull for glassing

February will be a shortened month as I have to go on a business trip for most of it. I am hoping to have the port hull ready for glassing with all hull joins and screw holes filled and sanded.

1st Feb 2006 Still filling hull joins

I really admire builders in the northern states of Australia that can build a boat in the heat and humidity that they must face. It has been a warm summer here in Gosford NSW and I am finding I can only stand about 4 hours before the heat gets to me and I find myself making mistakes or missing things. Fortunately I have caught them so far or they have been harmless such as forgetting to put the masking tape on a join and finding the filler running out on the other side. Like yesterday I mixed a batch of filler and couldn't figure why it wasn't getting thicker and heating up. I had forgotten to add hardener! So after about 4 hours of 35 degrees heat I have had enough and I go home for a swim.

Today was no different. It was so hot again that another batch of filler went off in the bag before I had even put a drop of it on the hull! I managed to get about a third of the bag out before I had a red hot solid ball of filler smoking in the bag! I would love to get a photo or a video of it one day.

I have managed to finish the inboard side of the hull and only have the bilge to keep join on the outboard side to go then I have the big gap in the keel panels to fill. This will be a bit trickier as it is so high off the ground and it will require an off-cut of Duflex glued down the middle. I could use filler but there are 2 problems with that, 1 it is a big hole and would use a lot of expensive filler when I have free off-cuts ready to use, they just have to be cut to fit, and 2 being such a big gap and using so much filler it would get very hot. So I will definitely use an off-cut to plug most of the gap before filling.

I have prepared the inside of the hull with masking tape and removed the peel ply ready to fill the final join and the keel gap. We have business in Sydney tomorrow morning so I may get a few hours in the afternoon and I may only get a limited time to work on the boat on Friday as we travel to Melbourne for the weekend on Friday evening for a family wedding so we wont get to do anything on the boat this weekend. And of course there is work work to be done all the way through.

I am hoping we can have the filling done by Monday and the keel filled by Tuesday and ALL the joins sanded ready to be glassed by the following Friday. We then go on a business trip for 2 weeks. I will then be ready to glass as soon as I return.

3rd Feb 2006 Almost finished filling hull joins

I have completely filled all the hull joins including removing all the tabs and filling the gaps left under them. I did this work yesterday (4 hours until the heat got to me) and today I have started on the gap in the keel. I started by selecting an appropriate off-cut and then measuring the gap and marking the off-cut to suit. I started at 5mm wide, figuring any thinner would be both too hard to cut and too hard to glue in place, all the gap less than that will get some filler. I measured the gap at 1mt intervals and transferred the gap sizes to the off-cut and then just marked a straight-line between the points (the gap was 12mm at 1mt, 20mm at 2mt, 25mm at 3mt, 25mm at 4mt, 20mm at 5mt, 15mm at 6mt, 12mm at 7mt and 6mm at 8mt). Then it is a simple job to cut along the line with a jigsaw. A tip here (thanks Sean) is to cut at a slight angle so that the piece is slightly narrower at the bottom so it fits into the gap better, you can fill the gap from the inside when you turn the hull and glass the inside. In the photo of the jigsaw I have exaggerated the angle to show the angle but only a few degrees are needed to make the piece easier to fit. Here and there the pieces were still too wide, I marked them with a felt pen at the wide spots and removed them with the jigsaw and I then had a fairly tight fit.

Once I had cut the pieces I needed (I needed 2 pieces as the gap narrowed to nothing then flared again, I started gluing the first piece in. I mixed some glue (403 powder, resin and hardener) and pasted the inside of the gap, and then once I had pushed the piece down into the gap I filled the rest of the gap with glue by pressing it in with a spatula as if it were filler. And the result you can see is a fairly tightly filled gap that will harden as if it were one piece again. I ran out of time on Friday so it is a fairly simple (remember Murphy's law!) job to glue the other one in and then fill the remaining gaps with filler. 

The Duflex is acting as a core for the sheets of glass that are going to be laid both sides of the hull (inside and out) under the waterline so there is no loss of structural integrity by cutting strips of Duflex and filling in this way. Some boats are made entirely of strips of Duflex or other material such as ceder. I am just making a smooth bed for the glass to adhere to. I am happy with the job I have done. Just like a bought one!

 

Next job is to spot fill any remaining gaps and all the screw holes with a 50mm syringe full of not so thick filler, then when dry, sand all the filler away to a smooth surface for the glassing. I am in Melbourne for a family wedding this weekend so I will get back to it Monday. The keel gap filling was a lot easier than I thought it would be and I am now ahead of schedule by a day or 2 so I am fairly confident I can have it all sanded ready for glass by the end of the week.

6th Feb 2006 Now finished filling hull joins

I have now finished filling all of the hull join gaps so all that is left to do before sanding it all smooth is to fill all of the screw holes. I am getting some super large syringes and will give them a try tomorrow. Some people drill out the holes even further to make them much easier to fill, I am going to try to fill them as they are, and as the screw holes are made by self taping screws they should have threads in them. I think that the thread will keep the filler in place once it is set. It will not be a male tube of glue inside a female hole, it will be male thread to female thread shape and therefore should hold much better.

I think that I may still have some spot filling here and there that will show up once I start sanding back the filler. I have probably put a little too much filler at the bow but it will sand back so I am not too concerned but it does look a bit of a mess in the picture. Overall though I am very pleased with the way the hull has turned out and am very pleased with the shape. I think that the hull entry in these pics shows why Schionning boats sail so well. The entry is aggressive but flares to a very buoyant bow that has built in buoyancy and safety. I sound like I know what I am talking about don't I?!

I bought the Jan/Feb edition (76) of Multihull World magazine to read on the way down to Melbourne on Friday and was surprised to see myself and Jo in an article on Wilderness Kit cats in it on Page 6. At the risk of infringing copyright I have included a pic above. I am sure they wont mind me putting it in as I am in effect advertising their mag and besides they didn't ask me if they could publish pics of me in their mag, not that I am complaining. I am happy to be a celebrity!! I wonder if I will get a discounted subscription! I doubt it.

8th Feb 2006 Sanding the filled hull joins

I started sanding the filled hull joins today. I found the going slow and hard with the orbital sander. I had applied way too much filler and only had to remove it all again. In the end I used a 80 grit sanding disk on the angle grinder which removed it very fast but will a lot of dust. I stopped half way through the first join to go out and buy some cheap tarps to cover the stock so that dust doesn't settle on it. In the end with the experimenting with the grinder and going for the tarps I only managed to do the one join today. I also assembled the Wombat wet out machine as a distraction from sanding. It looks like it should work really well and as I wont be glassing for a month or so the heat should have subsided meaning I should have a little more time as the heat causes the resin to go off fast. 

After grinding away the excess filler I used the orbital to smooth out the join and round it off. I ground a little too far in just one spot about 5cm long by about 5mm wide and about 1mm too deep, removing the pre glassed layer. It is only small and wont affect the hull strength, it will be under another layer of glass, is tiny and is well above the waterline. A tip here to find if you have a smooth round join is to run your hand along the join but not to look at it as you walk along the hull. You will feel any irregularities. I had about 3 highs or lows that will need either more sanding or some filling but they are so small that I will wait until I have the glass on to fair them as I think that the glass will cover them anyway. This method of feeling for irregularities may only work where you can move along the join uninterrupted which may be harder on the ones up high. You certainly cant see these high or low spots.

I figure I have made about 4 mistakes so far and none have cost me anything but more work. I made a cutting mistake with the jigsaw when removing the panels from the sheets, that needed filling and will need to be glassed over, I put way too much filler on the joins and this grinding error and I put the last temp bulkhead up in the wrong position which needed me to re position it. All up they have cost me about 5 hours work and a small amount of resin/filler wasted. I am sure there will be more mistakes like this, as there would be on any new thing but lets hope they are all minor like they have been so far.

I have an explanation of what the wombat junior wet out machine does if you click on the picture above or this link.

I have 2 days to sand 5 more joins (6 including the keel join). I think I can achieve this. I also still have spot filling to do. I will then go on my business trip and will be ready to tape the outside of the hull on my return. One more thing, I rang Hans today, who is building the same boat, he started after me but has now caught and passed me. He has used the same amount of resin and hardener that I have so we have either both used the wrong amount or both got it right. I think the boat is so easy to make to this point that we must have got it right.

10th Feb 2006 Finished sanding (almost)

I have now sanded all of the filler filled joins except for some unfilled holes here and there, and attempted to sand the join down the middle of the keel. This was a little harder to do because most of the fill was Duflex and glue filler which is much harder stuff than the filler and therefore much harder to sand smooth. I am getting a better sander so I will do the keel and also some more spot filling and then sanding back once that sets. So I am almost ready to start glassing. I was a couple of days (so that means about 6 hours) ahead of my schedule but as my goal was to be entirely ready to glass I guess I am now a little (maybe 3 hours) behind schedule. No big deal. 

The turn around is more due to last minute pre trip stuff that needed to be done for work rather than the boat taking longer although I did mess around a while trying to rig a dust extractor which turned out to be a really effective dust spreader. We have one of those bagless wet and dry Shopvacs that we thought would be ideal, but we must be using it wrong because the dust goes up the hose, through the filter and comes out at speed through the out vents on the machine and fill the air whereas without it, some dust goes up but the bulk of it falls down to the floor below the area I am sanding. So it's back to the drawing board on that one! I had to put tarps over the stock, and the dust having been "filtered" is very fine and walls and doors are no impediment to it and there is a fine film of dust all over the place. I will have to spend some time cleaning up the place on my return before I will start anything else on the boat by order of the management (Jo!).

For those that don't know, this will be the last post for a while (3 weeks) as I have to go on a business trip. So the logs should start again in March.

Time Spent: 21.00 Hours

Total build time so far: 241.00 Hours   Total Elapsed Time: 5 Months 2 weeks

March 2006 logs