Trial-fitting of wingnet rails

It was a late night at work for me so I only had about an hour to work on the boat. Generally speaking I hate to do sanding with only that much time available, so I worked instead on trial-fitting the rails. Some folks have been asking me about what the rail-to-float geometry looks like, so these pictures should illustrate how it goes together.

The below picture shows my plan for holding the rails in place while I'm gluing them down (the 2"x4" wood will be covered in masking tape, just in case). I am going to glue the rails on in two phases: the rail-to-deck flat joins first, followed by the under-rail-to-float-edge. That way I can control the rail positioning exactly during each phase.

A view from the long end (the rear of the rail is not clamped down so it torqued out of position a bit, which is why it doesn't look parallel to the float centerline):

And one from underneath:

I need to trim off the excess on the bottom of the under-rail supports, and you can see the line I drew on the rear-most support in the above picture. Anyway, hopefully I'll get the rails all glued and taped on this week, and be fairing by Friday.

One other thing I forgot to mention last night. My HVLP spray gun came with a 1.1mm nozzle\needle combination. The literature for Alexseal's high-build primer says you should use a 2.2mm set -- wow. I couldn't even find an Accuspray "Prokit" in that size, so I settled for a 1.5mm set. Long story short, when I tried to spray with the 1.5mm nozzle, it felt like I was guiding a fire-hose (and this is what contributed to most of the overspray, I think). After my first coat of high-build I switched back to the 1.1mm nozzle (guidelines be darned) and it was much better. When I bought the HVLP kit, the technical guy at AxisPro told me that the default nozzle was "good enough" for most applications and based on this experience I guess he was right.

One more comment: Saturday's high-build spraying was my first opportunity to use Alexseal's "primer accelerator", and I was curious to see how much of a difference it would make. Well, when I sanded down the high-build on Sunday, the primer was nice and hard, and I had much less clogging of the paper to deal with. Two thumbs up! :-)

Wingnet rails, part...uh, never mind

A brief post to update progress this week.

My wingnet rails are now faired and primed. Earlier this week I attached the underrail supports:

I then spent some time fairing the support attachment points seen above (but not much time: my main fairing goal for underneath the rails was to leave them reasonably smooth enough that someone reaching a hand underneath there won't get cut).

Yesterday I applied two coats of the highbuild primer; today I sanded that down, then put on two coats of the finish primer:

Tip: when spray painting in your garage, even with a "low overspray" HVLP system, you should lean toward more plastic masking, not less.

Although progress on the floats is mostly stalled until the wingnet rails are done, I did get the deck attachment points prepped. It's not very fun grinding down through primer and fairing compound that you've spent hours and hours of sanding on:

I've also been trying to use this time to catch up on other stuff. Here's the last of the laminate (two extra layers of C on the front part) being bagged for the bow web:

I'm now ready to start cutting slots in the bow web.

I also bagged my first daggerboard case half. Here I am in the middle of lamination, before the core went on; if you look carefully you can see the UD glass:

Here it is with the bag on (got good seal on this one):

And here's a picture of the inside of it after unmolding (forgot to put peel ply against the mold first, but it looks ok):

Everything went fine except for one thing which I didn't notice until I unmolded it today: it looks like I left the foam core just a tiny bit too wide, and near the aft upper edge it butted out past the mold a small amount:

It's mistakes like this that makes me feel like a blithering idiot, but obviously I haven't made enough mistakes to learn the lesson yet. I've sent Ian an email asking for advice, to see if he'd keep the part or toss it. We'll see what he says.

Other than all of the above, I've been studying the plans every chance I get, to get ready for starting the main hull.

Wingnet rails, part 5

I can't believe it's already late July -- the summer feels half-way over, and I still haven't painted my floats. Ouch. Anyway, this is just a short post to update my progress. I wish I had more to report, but work and family have been keeping me pretty busy.

Last Monday or Tuesday evening, I re-primed my port float with four coats (first coat in gray, as before). I then spent the rest of the week sanding the floats back down to 400 grit. Really this went pretty fast. I attribute this to the fact that the sprayed-on primer lays down really, really nice, and I was able to use my electric sander with 220 grit right from the start. With my earlier rolled-on primer coats, I ended up with much stippling in the surface that required a lot of longboarding to cleanup; I think I wasted a lot of primer that way. To be fair, the Alexseal rep had warned me that their primers weren't really designed for rolling. I won't ever roll the primer on again.

The gray primer base coat helped a ton, especially around the edges (keel, bow, transom, etc). It was a pain to have to clean the gun and mix new primer right after the first coat, but I loved that feeling of security you get when you can visibly tell you're "getting close". Even so, I did get a couple of sand-thru spots, one on a transom edge and one a keel area near a bow, due to carelessness. Not a big deal compared to how many I had before. I won't post any pictures of the re-sanded floats, since they are fairly boring at this point.

I procrastinated somewhat on the fairing of my wingnet rails because I didn't want to deal with sanding on these long floppy parts. On Sunday I finally got the job started, putting on the first coat of fairing compound:

And today I got around to sanding:

This was followed by a second thin coat of fairing compound, to fill in the imperfections. (Hmm, I seem to remember this procedure from somewhere? :) I believe I'll need at least three fair-sand passes on the outside (visible) parts of the wingnet rails, but I'm still debating how far I want to take the under-side though, since it will be rarely seen.

Wingnet rails, part 4, and more finish primer

Saturday I worked on marking and trimming the wingnet rails. Ian doesn't give exact measurements for this, but by carefully measuring the dimensions on the deck layout plan sheet and using the scale factor to convert, it's not too hard to figure out what it should look like. I also spent some time looking the rails over while they sat in place on the floats, and doing some rough-in marks to make sure they would clear the access hatches:

Then I took them back in the garage, and drew in the final cut-out marks. I didn't seem to have anything suitably round in the garage for making the quarter-radiuses, so I improvised with a can of soup:

Yeah, I know clam chowder would have been more appropriate but we were out-of-stock -- I'll just have to deal with the shame.

After some jigsaw work, voila:

I also cut the rails down length-wise so that they ended 2.5" inside each beam location index dowel. I did this without much thinking though, and I now think I should have left them a bit longer just in case the beams turn out narrower than I expect. I'll save the cutoffs and in the worse case maybe I can laminate them back together.

I've put some thought into the sequence I should follow for attaching the rails to the floats. Bear in mind, I still need to scuff, re-prime, and re-sand my floats - and I think the wingnet rails could be easily damaged if they are attached to the floats while I'm turning them this way and that way, in order to sand the sides. So I'm going to do things in this order:

1. Scuff the floats back up to 150 grit.
2. Re-prime the floats.
3. Sand the floats back down to 400 grit.
4. Pre-fair the wingnet rails (leaving the taping surfaces as raw glass).
5. Locate the wingnet rail attachment points, grind those areas back down to glass, and laminate the rails to the floats.
6. Fair the rail attachment points and prime them. All of the attachment points are on or near the deck of the float, so I can leave the floats upright for this step.
7. Paint the entire float, including the wingnet rail.

Once I'd decided on the above, this made scuffing and re-primering a big priority again. So I spent the last half of my Saturday work day, sanding down my floats to 150 grit again.

Today was a bit slow due to some family events. However, I did get my HVLP system setup again, and I put four coats of the finish primer on my starboard float. As I mentioned before, the first coat was gray to serve as a warning layer when I'm sanding (so I don't go too far next time):

My spray gun worked really well. The primer coats turned out much smoother than when I did them with the roller (when I start sanding, I think I'll be able to start right at 220 grit). My nozzle size is 1.1 mm, which is just below the range recommended by Alexseal (1.2-1.6mm). For whatever reason, it looked like the primer coats were going down very thin, which is why I continued on with three coats of white.

I need to get some more lighting in the tent -- otherwise it is very hard to see sometimes, where you've sprayed and where you haven't. For primer it's not such a big deal, but I imagine this could make things really hard for the top-coat application. I do happen to have a dual halogen worklight that I bought last winter -- I'll give that a try next time.

I also learned some lessons about hose management; it's easy to forget about the hoses, and I dragged them through the primer a couple times. Easy to fix, but I'm really glad I'm getting this practice opportunity now. I also used cable-ties to tie the sprayer and the respirator hoses together, which helped a lot when dragging them around.

I'm not sure I'm totally happy with the full-face respirator. On the plus side, it's easy breathing and it doesn't fog up. On the down side, it's hot as hell, fills up with sweat really fast, and it's hard having your vision constricted. I think tomorrow I'll order the half-face version, so I can compare.

On the 4th of July I had gotten some advice from my brother-in-law, that you should vary your pass directions. Eg, first pass uses a side-to-side motion with a vertical fan pattern, second pass uses a up-and-down motion with a horizontal fan pattern. I didn't really think this would be necessary, but boy was I wrong -- even when you're doing a good job of overlapping your passes, it's still quite easy to see pass "lines". So I flipped directions for my 2nd coat of white, and it did seem to help.

BTW, my HVLP system is looking much more manly now; not so nice and shiny anymore with white and gray dusty overspray on my hoses.

Wingnet rails, part 3

[Hopefully this won't turn in a long-running series...e.g., "Wingnet rails, part 17"...]

Yesterday after work I got to work unmolding the first upper support rail. This turned into a bit of a job. I had cut the glass a bit too long, and it had been tucked underneath the bottom of the molds on the ends, and cured in that position. To make it worse, I hadn't done too good a job on masking off the bottom of the mold. The glass also wrapped around the bottom of the lower lip somewhat. I pried and hacked and even smacked the end-wrapped parts with a hammer, but they weren't budging. So I cut off the ends of the laminate, mold and all. This is what the chopped-off parts looked like:

This strategy worked great and I was left with this to unmold:

Here I did a sanity check against the pattern:

Not perfect, but it could be how I took the picture: holding the paper still while snapping the shot one-handed. Even so it looks pretty darn close except for that lower lip, but I don't think it will be a problem.

After prying, prying, and more prying, eventually I got it popped loose. Then I laid it aside because I wanted to focus on getting the second main support rail laminated and bagged. This went pretty smoothly -- it always does the second time around.

Tonight after work I unmolded the second support rail; it was actually a bit easier than the first one, since I'd reduced the width of my glass in both dimensions, so I got much less "wrap-under" on the mold but I still found it necessary to chop an inch or so off each end. Then I got busy removing the peelply from both rails; I'd forgotten how much fun this can be (not):

Eventually though it was all done and my support rails are now ready to be trimmed and attached to the floats:

That's all for today; it's been a long week between both day-job work and boat-job work. Tomorrow I'll get started trimming the rails down, and (cringe) grinding my floats back down to glass in the necessary spots.

Finally, if someone local to the area would like to take ownership of my wingnet rail molds, I'd be happy to give them away - otherwise they will get chopped to pieces in a week or so since I don't have room to store them. Even after chopping a little bit off of each end, the main support rail mold is still 9' 8 1/2" long - should be plenty I think. Email me and let me know if you want them - you pick up.

Wingnet rails, part 2

Today after work I un-molded the support rail. Here's how it turned out:

Looks okay, but it felt quite thin...

...and not quite as stiff as I was expecting. As soon as I picked it up, I said to myself "shoulda done that fifth layer of glass". The plans only called for four, but I had a fifth layer ready to go yesterday while doing the laminate. I almost put that extra layer of glass on, but at the last moment decided to keep faith in Ian and keep it "per-plan". Logically that has to be the right decision, but it's hard to resist the urge to "just beef it up a little".

Then it was on to the main support rail. First I sanded it all down, got rid of the rough edges, and smoothed over the corners including running a small round-over bit down the one right angle corner. Here it is after covering it up with masking tape:

Then it was time to prep the rest of the vacuum bag materials: two layers of peelply, release film, breather, and bag film with mastic attached. Oh yeah, plus the glass; it's fun cutting four 10' long pieces as they come off the roll:

Finally it was time to wet-out the glass. Working with 10' lengths is fun. Here I am wetting out and rolling up the first piece:

See all those little strings of glass hanging off? It's times like this that I say to myself "why didn't I decide to use the glass with a backing mat so I don't have to deal with this crap?" :) Here is the form with the second or third layer of glass rolled out onto it:

Originally I thought I would make a real bag out of two pieces of bagging film, but changed my mind because there were a lot of little sharp edges underneath the form; many were in hard-to-reach spots and I was worried that these would poke holes in the bag. So instead, I bagged the form against my workbench countertop. With such an odd shape, this has some drawbacks like, will the pressure stretch the bag too far? Well it hasn't yet but we'll see; the bagging film and mastic is getting quite the workout:

The pump took a long time bringing the pressure down, and never got higher than ~22 lbs; which means the vacuum switch is useless since I have it set at a 25lb cutoff. With the bag and the mastic stretching so much I guess I can't expect much better. Anyway, I don't care if the pump gets an overnight workout as long as the part turns out good.