Panel #10 planked..

Rolf picked up 4000 staples saturday between other tasks. Sunday panel #10 was all planked. 5 hours from start to finish. Not bad I think.
Next weekend it would be great to have #11 out of 12 planked.

Winter has come and temperature in the workshop dropped quite a bit with the snow. We have got our hands on a bit of bubble wrap and will try that on the single pane window and the garage port.

Since first of august we have 116,5 hours in the project. Most of it spent on producing hull panels, ripping planks etc. It is good to get some progress, even if the number of hours spent on the project is substantial.

Out of staples!!

Rolf taped over the male mould tonight with packing tape. We do this to stop the hull from sticking to the mould after glassing. We definately dont want that so this is an important job.
The first planks was also fitted, but after just four planks, we ran out of staples! Got to remember to buy more tomorrow!

Progressing slowly..

Tonight Omar and Rolf ripped more strips for panel 10,11 and 12. Cleaned up all the sawdust and put the strips in storage.
Afterwards we removed #8 from the female mould and flipped #9 into the female mould. Set it up and clamped it to the mould. Filled all voids and cut off some of the longer planks. Friday night it will be possible to either do some sanding or begin planking of #10.. The ambition is to finish planking and gluing #10 this weekend. We will see..

Cutting planks..

Frode and Rolf spent the night in company with a circular saw and some planks.. A load of new strips is in place and there is still one more 1 inch plank to rip.

Panel 9 glassed on the outside.

One thing less to do.. Need to be quick in turning the panel over and glassing the inside as well to stop warping and twisting.

Panel #9 pre-coated

So that is it. Just some light washing and sanding left and then it is time to get the glass on #9..

Panel #9 planked and glued..

Title says most of it. #9 was planked in 3.5 hours, had the gunwhale laminated the same evening and the whole thing was glued. Now that is real progress.
Tonight I pulled about half of the staples on it. Plan to finish the job of pulling staples tomorrow and perhaps do some sanding. Have to shop for some more wood to convert into boat.

Panel #8 glassed on the inside.

Another evening in the spacesuit applying glass and epoxy to the inside of pane #8. Some issues with the fillet where we added too much chopped glass and removed to much when rounding it. Also a zillion outgassing bubbles today. We suspect the 100watts lightsource that was positioned above the panel. Nothing 5 minutes with the garage door open did not fix.

Panel #7 done, and then some.

Panel #7 was moved to Omars carport last night, for storage. Now the female mould is occupied by panel #8. The inside of #8 was sanded during last nights session. Finished preliminary sanding and filled all gaps with thickened epoxy. The sanding gear Florin sent me from Romania really makes all the difference. Variable speed angle grinder, 36grit discs and some foam pads. Stuff it is quite hard to get in Norway, or at least in Molde and on the 'net. Thanks a lot Florin!

Omar and Frode also cut the glass for a new test-tube which I hope to get startet pretty soon. Exciting times!

Glassing panel 8

Late night session glassing the outside of panel #8. No drama!

Panel #8, take 2

I am beginning to get really good at this..I am getting really good at this..

Ok...

The quick fix was not good enough. After the staples was removed the hull pulled apart from the tension in the planks. Oh well.. That failure is no longer in the workshop and the new hull panel #8 is well underway. Lesson learnt I hope!

Quick fixes sometimes works..

Looks like the quick fix worked well enough. At least the epoxy have hardened so the strips stay together. Next point is laminating a new gunwhale on #8, pulling staples and filling the marks left by the chisel when we removed the faulty gunwhale..

Then it is off to sand the inside of #7 and #8 :)

Quick fixes.. fingers crossed

Frode and I spent two hours tonight chiseling off the gunwhale on #8, cleaning both #7 and #8 as well as possible and re-gluing. This time we made sure the epoxy was mixed correctly! Will be very, very, exciting to see how this went tomorrow evening!

First epoxy mishap.. *bugger*!

The day had to come, and now it is here.

Looks like we have mixed hardener and hardener instead of resin and hardener. Consequenses: Gluing of panel #8 will not be optimal, and it will be kind of a mess. Gunwhale on panel #8 might be suspect. The filling done on the inside of panel #7 need to be re-done. Some stuff will have to be re-done obviously..

I hope the lessons is learnt so we dont do this again. It is a shame really as we did so much that night..

Panel #8 planked

Hull panel #8 is all planked. Next task is laminating the gunwhales and gluing the panel with epoxy. Then we can sand the inside of #7 and the outside of #8 in one go.

Panel #7 glassed on the outside

That is it, panel 7 is glassed on the outside and ready for sanding+glassing on the inside. Planking on #8 will commence immediately.

Planking #7

Sunday evening I was able to tape all the stations + gunwhale mould + table with packaging tape to isolate the mould from the hull panel. I also got around to actually fitting 3 planks.

Last night I snuck down in the workshop for an hour and fitted 6 more planks. Planking a hull is actually a quite fast task. The time hog is the sanding.. Two more sessions and I guess the hull panel is planked + one session for the gunwhale. Then it is sanding and glassing before we try to match the hull panels. The big moment.. Got to remember to tape that moment. It will either be a "kodak moment" if the panels are ill fitting or assymetrical, or big grins if it is just right.

Test beam made in glass.

First test tube is out of the mould. Last night around 2130 hours I began cutting and wetting out glass. Three layers of glass and three additional layers where the beam is to go. The evenings goal was to learn how to do this properly, and I certainly reached that goal!

1: Have a table for wetting out long enough for the whole piece of cloth you are working on. If not, the cloth will be hard to wet out properly and you will have to handle the cloth some, which it dont like.
2: This is a two person job. One mixing epoxy and one applying it. 3 persons would be even better.
2: Put all the layers of cloth in position on the table before putting them into the mould. Otherwise it is hard to align them properly.
3: The bag should not be too large, just a bit larger than the mould. If it is too large you get wrinkles!

After running the pressure up to 2 bar last night, the bag decided to start leaking. Somehow it managed to rupture close to the air-inlet. It was not a large hole, just 2 cm, but enough to create trouble. To try and save the situation I ran the compressor continously, but I did not take the chance on letting it run without rest for the whole night. The compressor managed to hold the pressure at 2 bar, but I suspect that the result would have been even better without the leak.
As it is, the tube is not perfect. At some places there are dents.. It looks like these dents are located where the bag have been twisted a bit? A smaller bag and no leaks should help. As the picture below shows, there is a dent where the bag have "folded" due to excessive materials in the bag.
Here is a pic of the bag inflated, resting on the bottom part of the mould. It is quite a bit larger than the mould, which I think is part of the problem.
Anyway, before committing carbon fibers, I will want to make another test run with glass.


The good news is that the finish of the beam is very nice and the method obviously works. Even with 6 layers of glass at one beam end the pressure made the laminate conform very well to the mould and no air-bubbles, gaps or anything. Overlap was very hard to see as well, so the pressure must have been immense. Considering -1bar is a perfect vacuum, 3 bars should be more than enough to consolidate the laminate for our beams.


Here is a pic of Omar with our beam mould. Looks quite dangerous! Considering that the mould holds 3 bar of pressure when the pic was taken, Omar was a bit skitterish :-)

Gahh, compressor woes..

So I had to open the 400V controller for the compressor motor to adjust the working pressure. I was able to make the compressor stop at 3bar, but then it drops down to 1 bar before it turns on again. Not an optimal solution! Will have to seek advice with those in the know how in the composite business..

Compressor exploring..

We stress tested the mould last night. 3 bar of pressure inside it and all OK.
The bag developed a small leak at each end of the mould so we need to check that, but otherwise the system worked perfectly. Tonights mission is to find out how I can make the compressor turn itself on when the pressure falls to 2.5 bar and off again when it hits 3 bar..

Gunwhale mould in position.

Tonight I routed the insets for the gunwhale mould and fitted it to the stations on the strongback. We are now ready to begin building panel #7! Hooray!!

Frode talked about coming over tomorrow, if he does we can turn the strongback over so it is possible to begin putting planks on the mould.

Cutting planks..

Since last update we have been busy cutting strips for the next hull parts and waxing the crossbeam mould. I dont know how many strips we have in storage now, but it is rather a lot..
Tomorrow night I have starter duty at the sailing club, but afterwards I'll do the final aligning of the stations after flipping them over.

Frode have gone to Spain for two weeks so Omar and I am free to head of on any wild tangent we can imagine. :-)

TADAAAAA

Last night we could finally begin flipping the stations over. What a great day! Marks the halfway point in the hull construction process.

The process was a bit slow as some epoxy had dripped on the table, and we definately had to remove the high spots to position the stations correctly. Not long now until we can join some halves and look at something resembling a complete hull. Installing bulkheads, beam seats etc should be a breeze after all the strip planking.

Next week I hope to have some pics of the beam mould and the setup there. Just need to source 20 hose clamps of 100mm diam at a reasonable cost and some other stuff needed.

Here is a pic of Frode, enjoying flipping stations over and removing epoxy drips from the screwheads. Note to self, tape over the screwheads this time. Aligning the stations precisely is very important so we spend some time on each station to make sure it is flipped right.

And to top it off, here is a bonus pic of Frode:
(he have begun to complain over being the favourite motive on the blog but since he dont take pictures and dont upload/maintain the blog he dont get to choose which pictures are put up here :-D )
The experienced photographer will notice the height difference between motive and photographer. He really is that tall.

Inside of #6 glassed.

An easy two hour session saw panel #6 glassed on the inside. Omar mixing epoxy while Frode and I laminate. This time we had no pre-coat so we had to use 6 (or was it 7, Omar lost count somewhere) batches a 132grams of epoxy. With a pre-coat on we need barely 5 batches.

Now the stations in the mould have to be flipped over so we can begin to build the other side of the hulls. Imagine that we have done no less than six strip plank panels!

We also had some discussions tonight on progress towards summer. Looks like we are going to try working on the boats two nights a week for a while. We can split the work now between building hulls and all the other bits and parts like beams, foils (Hmmm, still no plugs for the foils in the mail.. Need to check on my kind source), rudder system, spi poles and other bits and ends.

Frode have been shopping carnuba wax for the beam mould! Now we can begin giving it the neccesary layers of wax before building test tubes. The staff at the car equipment shop had no idea what carnuba wax was.. Bloody expensive stuff also!

Another hour..

Another hour spent sanding the inside of #6. The tally is up to two hours by now, and I still have to shape the gunwhale to blend in with the fillet to go there (for the glass). It is 90% done though!

If Frode brings his angle grinder tomorrow night, I'll make short work of the gunwhale shaping. This is time well spent. Just 6 more panels to go (*groan*)

Sanding the inside of #6

I had one hour available today, so I jogged down to the workshop to start sanding the inside of #6. When my hour was up, I was about halfway down the length of the panel. 40grit sure makes progress. Just wish my angle grinder was not busted, then I could have been done with the whole panel.

We do produce some dust with all the sanding we do! Here is a pic from the bow section after todays session.

Progress on #6

Last wednesday we glassed panel #6 on the outside. Here is a pic of the finished result before the epoxy kicked.Spent 2 hours from start to end of the whole operation. We are definately getting better at this.
Tonight I was down in the workshop again to pull the panel off the mould and put it into the female mould/crib for glassing on the inside. Since the angle grinder is bust I spent the rest of the nigth filling any gaps on the inside. There are always some at the bottom of the boat no matter how careful I am with the plane. Sunday I might be able to sand down the inside and pre-coat for glassing the coming week. Who knows :-)
Anyway, we are near the point where we can flip the stations over and begin building the other halves of the hulls. That makes us this happy:
We have also progressed on the mould for the beams. The mould is in the workshop, alu tube split on a large CNC mill. Really nice split! Here is Omar holding the cast end-plugs
Last, I could not help myself but put up a picture of a sunrise as seen from my office window. It was on the phone with the building photos so..

#6 is pre-coated

After some snafu with sanding pads having the wrong side of the velcro glued to them (we dont mention names, do we Frode?) and other fun mishaps, #6 is now ready for glassing. Tonight I put on a layer of epoxy as a pre-coat before glassing. About 60 grams of epoxy was neccesary to cover the whole hull with a thin layer.

I also cast the first end-plug for the beam mould. 260grams of epoxy mixed at 50% with chopped glass should do the trick at 2 bar.

#6 roughly sanded.

Tonight all three of us was present, and I began the with the angle grinder. It is such a quick way to remove epoxy that using the beltsander is a drugde. Unfortunately the chineese quality angle grinder burnt out after just 5 minutes..
Frode finished off the rest with the belt sander. I was more than happy to let him have a go at it after doing the 5 previous panels. He did good work, so I'll let him do the same with #7 ;)
We also filled all staple holes and spent a good time cleaning up in the workshop so we can begin work on beams and foils.

Staples pulled on #6.

Frode and I pulled all the staples from panel #6 today. 75 minutes total needed to remove the staples. Next opportunity I get, I will be busy with the angle grinder to remove epoxy.

#6 glued.

Spent an hour gluing #6 tonight. It takes an hour and 10 minutes to glue the panel properly.. Panel #7 I will tally the hours for. This is probably one of the slowest building techniques on earth, but still more fun than working with foam ;) Wonder how stiff the hulls will be..

Panel #6 planked and filled

Tonight Frode, Omar and fitted the last two planks on #6. Laminated and installed the gunwhale, filled all knotholes and fixed some other stuff as well. Great evening!

#6, just two more planks to go..

Two more planks after tonight, and #6 is ready to recieve gunwhales and filling/gluing.

More planks fitted on #6

Tonight I spent a bit more than an hour in the workshop, fitting planks. Next session I'll fill in the 'opening' with planks. Then the gunwhale and glue the whole stuff together. If I am a really good boy, the hull can be glued this weekend or during the next week.

Inside of panel #5 glassed.

Last night Frode, Omar and I glassed the inside of panel #5. Quite an enjoyable and efficient evening. Done in two hours with Frode and me laminating and Omar mixing epoxy batches. 550grams of epoxy used, and then we squeeged off some so not the full weight. Will be interesting to weight this panel as we have not used the pre-coat technique on these.

Now, on for panel #6. The big one before we can flip the stations over! I have already put some planks in place, so it is just a matter of continuing. Overtime work have taken much time lately, and I have a cold that drains my energy, but much of the planking on #6 should be done during the weekend.

A co-worker and I have begun chatting about building a plane. A replica of a WW2 Mosquito would be fun ;)

Some light sanding and planking.

Last night I sanded some fairing done inside panel #5. We had filled some gaps and knotholes with epoxy mixed with microballoons. It is the first time I have sanded microballoons, and that was a relatively pleasant experience. Sands really easily.

I also planked a bit more on panel #6. Hopefully I can glass the inside of #5 tonight, if I dont have to work more overtime..

A quiet weekend

This weekend was reserved for the family, in a cabin far, far away :-)

Sunday evening Frode came over, we planed down the gunwhale and filled a few gaps where I did not use the plane sparingly enough while planking. We also re-taped the mould and I got to fit six planks before I called it a night. Nice to have started on panel #6. Last one before we flip the stations over.

By popular request.. the mould.

Here is a quick pic of the mould. Many are wondering what the mould looks like, so here is a pic showing the whole thing.

Done sanding the inside of panel #5

After some breakages I am finally done sanding the inside of panel #5. Sanding wood instead of epoxy is just SO much faster! The angle grinder with the cleaning pad was a real timesaver.

In the last two nights the attrition rate have been rather high. The drill used to sand the inside with a foam pad bust a bearing. This is a cheap chineese drill, so I dont worry about it. It is still under warranty as well, so.. I also bust two of the foam pads I use when sanding with the drill. Things delaminated while sanding :-( Time to find a stronger or more flexible glue I guess.

Tomorrow night I'll plane the gunwhales to shape and post some photos.

done glassing panel #5 on the outside.

Practice makes perfect. Frode, Omar and me working together put on the glass on panel #5 in two hours. Will have to pop down later tonight for a quality check, but it went on easily and looked well. I did not have time to apply the pre-coat this time, so we used 100grams more epoxy than we usually do.
We also had time to do a movie pop-quiz while glassing. Great fun, but Frode is scary with his selection of movies at times. "Nobody puts baby in a corner".. Seriously!

Friday I plan to pop the panel off the mould and start sanding the inside for glassing. Hopefully we will manage to glass the inside during the coming weekend.

Done sanding panel#5

Last night I went over panels #5 with the longboard, and the panel is now ready for glassing. Hopefully that will happen tonight, if Frode or Omar comes to assist. Aim to do this fast so I can do the quality control before I go to bed.

I skipped making a blog entry the other night after I was down working over the hull panel with the belt sander and the sanding disc. Funny how that works, much more fun to enter a blog entry after each session.
For panel #6, I will enter the working hours with each blog message. Phill Brander asked me how l many hours each panel takes and I could not give an exact answer. The best I could do was a guesstimate, so now it is time to record working hours. I will not multiply working hours with an hourly wage and get the cost though!

Belt sander is too slow, enter the angle grinder!!

After reading some tips on Bjørn Thomassons (master strip plank builder and kayak+canoe designer) website, I tried a new metod for grinding off epoxy last night. With a coarse cleaning disc in the angle grinder, it was very easy to remove any epoxy from the hull panel. They moving on to the belt sander and the sanding pad in the drill. Without having to sand off the epoxy with the beltsander, it was much quicker sanding the hull. I also used far less sandpaper!
One needs to be really careful with the angle grinder though. 100% concentration all the time!

Tomorrow night I hope to get time to use the longboard a bit on panel #5. Otherwise, it is ready for glassing on the outside. One learns all the time..

Belt sander back in action..

Frode and I visited the shop where we bought the belt sander last night. We got a new one after some light arguing where the clerk wanted the original box and a bag for the dust. In the end, she accepted that she could just take what she needed to return the sander from the new box. Her alternative would be to have the sander fixed, so she choose a strange position to be obnoxious.
Before we left, we got 108,- norwegian kroner from her, since the sander now had dropped in price?? We did not understand it, but choose to not argue, accept the money and the new sander, and leave the shop.

When it rains, it pours..

First the skil saw, and tonight the beltsander overheated or burnt out. I dont know which, but at least it dont run when I press the button anymore. funny how you dont notice things like smoke coming from the sander when you wear goggles and a respirator..
Anyway, panel #5 is now sanded 50%, and I can do the rest with the disc sander. We definately need to get the beltsander back to life though. Great tool!