Working on float decks and other stuff

So far it's been a week of little things.

Last weekend I noticed that much of the keel taping on my first float, in the last two compartments (fore and aft of the aft bulkhead), was just plain terrible. Had some bubbles, but what seemed worse was that the glass was quite distorted and laying in different directions (this was from when I was doing the keel taping with the float on its side). So I spent Wednesday evening sanding those areas down to reasonable smoothness, and then retaped them.

Today after work I got busy prepping the floats and float decks for joining. I sanded down the float deck bottoms, as well as the float deck flanges and the tops of the bulkhead flanges:

(Side note: I've only recently discovered Festool tools. Wow - quite pricey, but they make some really nice gear. You can see my CT33 vacuum in the above picture, as well as the RO125 5" dual-mode sander; I also have a C12 screwdriver, and plan to buy more of their tools as budget allows. Using low-grit paper in "rough" mode is almost too much - you can take off a _lot_ of material in a hurry. I've been buying from Bill at Bill's Festool Supply who is local here in Washington State -- you can look him up at Festool USA on the "Find Dealer" page. I wouldn't quite call Bill a fanatic about Festool stuff, but he's a really nice guy who's willing to talk to you for hours about the tools, and just raves about them. He's also worked as a boatbuilder for several years (a long time ago -- what the heck is a "Piver"? Kidding!) so he's got some context on what tools work well on fiberglass and boat jobs.

And just in case anyone is wondering: all of my tools come inside the garage at night. :) )

Next up was cutting out the reliefs in the deck flange for the under-deck stringers:

The plans call for drilling small holes at the top of the fwd and center bulkheads, to help equalize air pressure. So I did that, right in the middle of the bulkheads. Then I drilled down into the top of the fwd bulkheads to make a hole for the location dowels, only to realize that the dowels would then block the air pressure hole I had just drilled in those bulkheads. Duh - so then I got to drill a slightly off-center hole in the fwd bulkheads to fix that. Always the little things that get you.

Here's the port float with its deck and dowels in place:

Both decks fit the curve of the hull quite well...not that it matters though, when the deck-to-hull-side join will have a large radius anyway. Gotta laugh at myself when I think back to how precise I tried to be when I was cutting out the float decks.

I also used a hacksaw blade to cut away the aft bulkhead flange glass that was partially covering up the access hole. Finally, I also sanded out a few bubbles here and there on the float deck bottoms and added some extra laminate over them before cleaning up for the night.

One thing I have not done yet is laminate the chainplates into the floats. I prepared the chainplate quite some time ago, around last December or something, but just put it away and didn't touch it until today. Well, I can't procrastinate any longer. Here's the chainplates after I cut them in two this evening:

Plenty of carbon over the tube, and the tubes are well-seated throughout in putty. I ran out of time to add the extra lamination so that will be my first chore tomorrow after work.

It's funny but if you look at closeup pictures of these chainplates, it's easy to miss the fact that each chainplate are just barely over 2" wide. Two inches! I showed them to my wife and explained that they are what holds the mast in place from side to side, and got a skeptical "really?". They look pretty dinky for the job they will do, but if I can't trust Ian's engineering then I'm in deep crap anyway. (I do trust him, for the record.)

Minor progress today

Today was mostly a day for catching up on family time. My wife has been really great so far about the project (thanks honey!) but I have been spending a lot of evenings working on the boat and didn't want to push it too far without a break; so I only had time for a few hours worth of work today.

The weather since yesterday evening has been terrible -- cold and rainy. When I checked my bulkhead flange laminates this morning, the first float was mostly cured, but the second float was still a bit tacky. I decided to leave the flanges alone for another day, but I did get the floats back into the cradles: here they are sitting together:

There's not much room to shuffle along beside them when they're together like that. I was able to lift the floats all by myself (one at a time) to get them into the cradles, but my back did not enjoy the experience. I'll avoid doing that in future unless I have to.

I then decided to tape my bow struts into place, and that went pretty quickly:

Later this evening after dinner, I decided to glue my bow caps together:

It looked and felt like I was frosting a multi-layer cake. :) You can see that the blank will be just about wide enough at the top, but way too wide at the bottom; I am planning on using a reciprocating saw and a planer to make the fairing job go easier.

Bulkhead flanges done

I spent Thursday evening trimming and sanding the deck flanges back, doing prep-sanding for the bulkhead flanges, and finished up the rest of the keel taping on the port float (as mentioned, very easy to do in the upright position):

I do wish I had a smaller sander though -- its very hard to get mine into small spaces like down by the keel joint. That's why you see a layer of putty under the tape in the picture above; the putty smooths out irregularities that are too hard to sand out, but would make the tape lie non-flat if left alone.

For doing the bulkhead flanges, I had been thinking that I would setup the form frames (#'s 5, 7, & 9) back up on the strongback, and then add a mold plate to the top of them (other F22 builders have been doing it this way, can't claim this as my idea). Then I began thinking about what it would be like crawl around in the middle of my strongback while laminating -- did not like that idea. So instead, I did my flanges with the float halves sitting on sawhorses. Each bulkhead had its own mold plate of course, held in place with a strap & comealong.

On Friday evening, I prepared the horizontal mold plates:

...cutting them to a reasonable size and covering them with packing tape. You can't tell in the pictures, but they are cannibalized from a few float frames (just like the Indians and the buffalo - no part of the carcass goes unused). I also prepared the angled mold plates used for the deck flanges:

Today the first order of business was setting up the mold plates on the float:

I really liked the idea of being able to sit on the chair while working, but I didn't seem to have enough scrap lumber laying around to get the float high enough (the chair fit, but I still wouldn't have had room to sit under the float). Also, there's not much room toward the aft of the float -- I was moving that rear sawhorse forward and back all day, depending on which side of the aft beam bulkhead I was working on. So alas, no chair - instead, I spent the day on my knees (ouch).

There is a crapload of laminates to be cutout for this phase of the project. I recommend staying as organized as possible, otherwise it is easy to lose track of where you are.

In some cases, you have eight pieces of glass per bulkhead side. By keeping the glass for each bulkhead side in a pre-counted pile, I didn't have to worry about counting glass layers as I went. (It would be quite tragic to be in the middle of the layup, and start wondering "was that two or three layers on that last bulkhead?")

Here's a fwd bulkhead beam, with just the first two layers of "C" laminate in place:

The angled line on the left is there to guide me later when placing the angled mold plate. Note the scribbled-out angled line on the right - that's right, I almost screwed up and laminated the deck flange backwards. Thank goodness I was double-checking things today; it's easy to get confused (could be just me though).

The fwd and center bulkheads are pretty easy to work on. You want to be careful on the aft bulkhead though....if you were to jerk your head to the side without thinking, you could guillotine yourself on the deck flange. :)

Here I am using hot-glue to place one of the angled mold plates into position:

(Wow, look at the belly on that guy. Maybe he should be building a tugboat instead of an F-boat? :))

The hotglue gun trick works great by the way; I was worried that the glue would not be sufficient to hold the mold plates in position, but they never budged.

Here is an aft beam bulkhead with all glass in place:

One thing I found, was that on the aft bulkhead the 9" angled mold plate does not quite fit if placed in the specified position and angle -- it's too long, and will hit the side of the float. I had not seen any other builders mention this though, and wasn't sure what do (and wasn't willing to lose time by emailing Ian about it). Choices were to trim the length to fit, stand the 9" mold plate up at a steeper angle, or position the bottom of the mold plate closer to the centerline. I chose the first option -- it didn't need much trimming, I think I cut it down to about 7 1/2" before it fit.

Working the glass on the angled mold plates is not difficult, but does take time. There are six pieces of "A" laminate per bulkhead side, for the fwd and aft beam bulkheads. I wet out and placed each piece of glass individually, since on the first beam bulkhead I tried to work a triple-layer of "A" into place and found it to be a difficult task and gave up. Doing it one layer at a time like that, by myself, meant I was up and down a lot today -- I will sleep good, for sure.

Float cradles assembled

Just a brief post to cover putting the float cradles together.

I have seen some really nice looking float cradles on the web, that look CNC cut and robust enough to hold up the Titanic. For awhile I was thinking that I had to create some cradles that kept up the tradition, and this was slowing me down a bit. This evening after work I got exasperated with myself and said "just build something, dang it". So I did.

I did have one good idea (for me anyway) which was that I could use the form frames themselves (#5 and #9 of course) as patterns:


This let me avoid having to get the form frame full size patterns out. Of course, the form frame lines are 3/4" off from the real hull (battens). So I scribed a line 1/2" inside of the frame lines, to give a little wiggle room, then cut out those parts with a jig saw. I cut out two pieces per cradle, and screwed them together so the float had a nice thick base to sit on. The cutouts formed little half-moons which I then used as side-braces:


A little bit of work later, including smoothing over all the edges with the sander, and I had a little family of these guys:



You can tell I wasn't being too precise with my jigsaw work, so some of the lines are a bit rough. Not worried about that, but I am wondering if they will be stable enough when I start sanding the hulls and whatnot. We'll see, if not I can always add some long side braces. I'm still debating about what color stain to go with (joke).

Here's the port float sitting up on the cradles:

(that's my sixteen year old son in the background, sorry for blocking your head out Zach.)

I can tell already, that finishing the keel taping from the upright position is definitely the way to go; looks like even the bow bulkhead would be pretty accessible like this.

Here's an aft shot:

Obviously I have some deck flange and transom trimming left to do. I have to say though, it was pretty motivating to see that float sitting nice and upright!

Port float joined and unmolded

Didn't get as far as I had hoped this weekend. The weather did not cooperate at all and sometime around midday Sunday I just got tired of being outside in chilly, rainy weather. However, I did get some things done.

Friday evening I laminated the fourth float half:


I thought everything went pretty well, but on Saturday morning I found a few minor layup bubbles here and there, and some massive bubbles around the perimeter of the chainplate pad laminate. Very aggravating. When I started sanding these out, the small bubbles went quick; the laminate over the chainplate pad was still a bit green however and when all was said and done, I had stripped both layers of "C" laminate off of the pad. Not much fun, but I did get it super nice and clean for re-lamination:

Saturday afternoon I joined the third and fourth float halves. The fit was pretty good except for the front beam bulkhead, that required some trimming. The upper float half was the first one I did, i.e. it's the one where I made lots of plank-to-keel join mistakes: not too surprising then that it would need a little help. All bulkheads were taped in -- including the #($#&*@# bow bulkhead which ended up looking like this:



I feel bad saying this but it could have been much worse, believe me. I'm hoping that this is the worst taping job on the whole boat (but I won't be too surprised to be disappointed).

The transom tape is not much fun either, but I was proud of how this one turned out:

I decided not to do the keel tapes other than two small pieces between the fwd beam and center, and center and aft beam bulkheads. I need to be more patient at times: I was trying to mix enough putty (using Fast hardener) to do two bulkheads at a time, and ended up losing the race to get the second bulkhead taped in before the fillet putty kicked. Trust me, the fillet tapes look wayyyy better when you lay them in place wet-on-wet. :)

Sunday morning I unmolded the float, and it looked good from the outside:

(Yep that's me; the wife came out to the tent for a status report and I got her to take a picture. I also took some of her inspecting the work, but I'm promised an early, slow death if those pics show up here on the blog.)

I really should have done the keel taping then, but the weather was chilly and so instead I stalled by dismantling my form frames.

I did some contact cement experiments on some scrap foam, and was not impressed. Either I'm expecting too much from contact cement, or I'm way spoiled by the gripping power of epoxy. I'm sure it doesn't matter, since Ian wouldn't recommend it if it was non-worthy, but I think I am going to use epoxy putty for my bow caps regardless. I had bought one two many sheets of 3/4" A500 -- was previously planning to sell it, but now I think I'll put it to use for the bow caps, which will minimize the number of join lines.

I also worked on preparing the bow compression struts. I'll probably break my arm patting myself on the back here, but they turned out really good. First step was shaping the struts and rounding the edges off:

(they are intentionally too long to start with - I'll cut them to fit later.)

Then I used my Raptor composite staple gun to staple one end of the glass to the struts:

The Raptor gun and staples worked really well - this was my first chance to use them. I was worried that the cloth would just tear through the staples but that didn't even come close to happening. It is a nice tool.

Then I wet out the glass, rolled it up as tightly as I could get it, and wrapped it in peel ply to help keep it tight:

After peeling off the peel ply after work this evening, the struts look great and feel even stronger.

Fourth float half ready for laminate

Here's a short update on progress this week so far, and plans through the weekend.

Tuesday night I planked the entire float half - it went quick, I just chugged through it.

Wednesday (last) night I dremel'ed between the planks and puttied everything together. I hadn't realized how low I was on micro and silica -- I used every last ounce I had to get the job done -- the last two deck flange corner pieces were glued on a bit sloppily (runny putty). I did have some wood dust left, but was trying to avoid using it (though I guess it wouldn't have mattered).

Tonight I sanded the float half down, shaped the chainplate pad, marked out the location of the stringer and the extra reinforcements, and pre-cut all of the glass except for the flange reinforcements (I'll cut those tomorrow from the offcuts from the main float laminate). I'm essentially prepped for laminate.

Tomorrow night after work (assuming the weather is at least half decent) I'll laminate this float half, and maybe also glue the bow caps together. I picked up some contact cement this afternoon for doing the bow caps; was thinking I'd use my A400 scraps for that job (figuring that A400 is more suited for a crush\crumple zone area).

Saturday I'll join the port float halves together, and maybe start working on the bow stringer cross-pieces, and also do something about constructing some cradles.

On Sunday I should be ready to set things up for doing the bulkhead flanges.

Here is the puttied and sanded float half:

Here's how I was setup for shaping (sanding) the chainplate pad; you can also see the markings on the float half for the extra reinforcements and the chainplate pad location:

Here's my garage "table" with all of the laminates cut and ready to go (the rolled up glass is of course the main laminate for the float half):

This is essentially how this corner of my garage looks every night, after I've cleaned up and put my car inside. Yes, it is a bit crowded. The benefit is that because I've got little room for leaving messes around, I tend to be somewhat anal about picking everything up. The garage so far has stayed decently clean throughout the project.