Deja Voodoo

Well, Cliff and I shot Duratec late into the night, and thank God (or whatever) it went off this time. Hard as a rock and ready to fill. So that's the next phase. Fill, dust with guide coat, sand with 220, and start wetsanding. The make shift spray booth we made also worked a charm, no paint where it shouldn't be, and no toxic smells made it out if the yard, at least no one complained. Time to go and sand.

Hangin in there

So, I've finally set a date to re-shoot the tooling (this Thursday night), been a while, so I'm really itchin to get back into build mode. I have a new gallon of Duratec and some "new" Mekp that I'm sure works, so it better go off this time. Over the last week I've hung some 8x10 foot tarps from the rafters in the shop so I don't get overspray everywhere. $3 dollars each at Biglots, quite the score, so I bought 6 of em. They should also come in handy when I start sanding the tools to keep the dust manageable. I also found some time to line the whole floor of the shop in double walled cardboard so that the garage floor doesn't turn gray and get full of goop when that whole mess gets started.
I spent the day making templates for the carbon and foam. I Took some huge pieces of paper and dusted one side of it with Super 77, then smoothed them onto the moulds. Traced the shapes I'm going to need on them, then pulled the whole mess off and cut out the shapes. Worked out really well. I could have pulled templates out of CAD but felt like doing it old school so I could feel like I was actually doing something (that and I'm sick of dealing with the techs at Kinko's). I haven't been sitting around or anything, since I couldn't really do much on the boat lately I've been spending a lot of time working at EBS getting my hands dirty. Its all prepreg work, but is teaching me a lot about mould building, mould prep, bagging and autoclaves, so that should come in handy down the road.

More changes

Since I'm at a stand still in the physical sense, I figured I could go back to drawing. I've had a couple changes I've wanted to mess around with, so today was the day for that. After some experiments with PVC tubes, I've decided that 2m was just to wide for the rack, it was to big of a step from the deck to the tube, so I've brought that back down to 180cm. I just think that's a better distance and will be more comfortable. I also brought the rear wing struts forward on an angle, because if I'm that far back on this thing its not set up right. I also found the time to pull all my bulkhead and rib layout specs from the 3d drawings, so now that's done. Tomorrow I want to work on a new Gantry. I'm thinking with the transom being 15cm shorter at the upper connection point with the new reverse trany, I might want to go with a 40cm gantry instead of a 50cm, just to lower the stress's a little. After that, maybe draw the jigs for building the sweet new rack. So much to do.

I have also added the new pic of the boat on the blog header, looks sexy eh?

Holding Pattern

I'm waiting to spray the tools again. It might be awhile, waiting for my schedule to open up a little bit, and trying to find a good time for Cliff as well. There is no way I'm moving all this stuff 1/2 way around the world again, so we are just going to shoot it in my new shop. Just need to find a "big" compressor to borrow. So while I'm waiting for all that to materialize, I've moved on to other things. I found some downtime at work to cut out the trimming templates for the deck and hull, and I've been staying up late making a big mess with foam core. I got some offcuts from EBS that I've been messing around with. I found out that it bends into most of my curves without the need for scoring, so that's good. I was also able to get it to mould into the tight "trouble area's" with a little thermo-forming help from my trusty heat gun. Another thing I've done is rethink how I"m going to foam my bow, I blunted the bow by 1/2'' so I have a nice flat bonding surface instead of a pointy tip. So, all in all, even with the recent problems I'm still making progress. Pictures of progress coming, just a little lazy right now.

Step away from the ledge

I've settled in to my new space, its twice as big as my old one, its great to have so much room. Spent the whole day in the 90deg shop with the respirator on scrubbing all the Duratec off the tools. Got pretty far, just a little more to go and I can re shoot.

Devastated

It finally stopped raining, so I went to pick up the tooling from the paint shop. Haven't been up there in a week, figured everything would be ready to go. Nope. The Duratec never catalyzed, the finish is still sticky. I mixed everything perfectly on a very accurate scale (2% MEKP), I must have got a bad batch of either Duratec or MEKP. I'm so bummed. Instead of buffing and polishing, I'm going to spend the next couple weeks stripping and cleaning. You live, you learn. All I can say is I'm pretty upset right now. Nothing I can do but move on. I'll get everything ready and try it again in a couple weeks (if I don't go nuts and throw everything in the trash or smash it with a sledge.) At least I know what everything is going to look like when its done, so that's kinda cool. I also know now to do a test shoot to make sure everything is working. I already have most of the big mould stripped (heavy acetone wash and a puddy knife). Its not as hard as I thought it was going to be. The Duratec basically sheets off, then you wash off whats left with an acetone soaked rag. While searching the Internet for a cure, I found hundreds of pages of painting horror stories, it seems like getting the paint right is as common as flying pigs. I would post pictures but I really don't want to look at it right now.