today I glued the rudder blade and the rudder assembly. It seems premature as the boat has not taken shape yet. But it is part of my space management approach to do all of the flat tasks while I have the flat surface in the strong back.
Back out to Fibertek to buy more epoxy with my assistant.
The apron and stems took much more expoxy than I had anticipated. This time I splurged and bought the gallon of resin and hope that I won’t have to make a trip back here soon. Note that the 15′ 2×6 douglas fir on the Larry vs. Harry handled fine.
Having access to a thickness planer makes this activity much easier and more precise. I was able with relative ease to plane the whole length of both the apron and stem down to the specified thickness on my own. I did spend some time fretting about keeping the angles square and not ending up with a weird parallelogram that would give the bow a weird twist. fortunately the thickness planer coupled with a square and some judicious hand planing kept everything progressing smoothly. When planing the apron down to the right 2″ thickness i was sure to keep checking that it was square.
When I ripped the strips for the bow stem I was not sure what the appropriate thickness would be so I played around with everything from 1/8″ to 3/16″ and up to 1/4″ most of my strips were 1/8″ thick.
Which meant that to create a 3″ thick stem I needed nineteen strips. Each strip needed to be buttered with epoxy and with so much surface area that turned out to be about 850ml of epoxy or nearly a whole can. If all my strips were thicker I would have used much less epoxy. The lesson that I learned is that when laminating use the thickest strips that the mould will bear.
Nineteen strips of Douglas fir waiting for the epoxy
Then Fortunately Patrice came out to help me with the laying out of the stem on the mould.
I started this morning with a borrowed thickness planer, which allowed me to get the apron down to the specified 2″ thickness and the stem down to 1 3/4″ width.
running the apron through the thickness planer
checking that the edges are squaregood view of the alternating grain pattern in the wood strips
The challenge was to keep checking the length of each piece to make sure it was square. I had to use the hand planer a couple times to get it nice and square the whole length so that the thickness planer did not perpetuate the wrong angle.
bow apron all glued and clamped
Once I finished the getting the stern apron and stem to the right width, I started on the bow apron glued up with epoxy and microfibres for better gap filling in the lamination and strength.
On Saturday my assistant and I went to the lumber yard to get one more 2×3 to rip for the bow apron lamination and a couple 2×4’s that may end up being used for the floor timbers.
it was suprizingly chilly saturday, we got rain, wind and hail.my assistant is ready to help me separate the apron and stem from the mould.pulling the stem lamination away from the apron after the epoxy has cureda good look at the epoxy that squeezed out and will have to be cleaned or planed off
I had planned to glue the laminate strips in one go on Wednesday evening. But as things go when doing something for the first time, things take longer than expected. It was a cold evening and the epoxy was more viscous than I expected so spreading it on each laminate took much longer than I anticipated.