beam fairings cont

we put the foam in the frames, after they had dried we sanded them, then prewet and coved, then laminated the inside, then grinded them down and fitted them to the beams.

plug and beam fairings

on wednesday for theory class we started preparing everything for making our plugs,
everyone was assigned different jobs (making sanding blocks, making jigs, processing timber, preparing an area for working).

i made one of the jigs...

when i choose my piece of timber i realised that it hadnt been speed sanded. this was wierd, i then measured the thickness, and found it to be 14.9mm when it was suppose to be 15mm. this was realy frustrating cause it still needs to be sanded which will take about another 1mm off and that will make the timber too thin...

after lunch we started setting up the frames for the beam fairings, we drilled and clamped them together with a straight egde, and after that we just cuit up the strips of foam.

beam fairings

this friday i just made the frames for the beam fairings.

after i had done all the lines in the body plan, i cut out the rectangular frames on the dimension saw (400x335x18) then taping the body plan onto the frames i took a (whats it called?), the little nail like thing in my combination square, and my hammer and made lots of little holes in the frames through the drawing. then i removed the drawing from the frame and connected the dots...

easy!

after that i cut out one set of frames on the small bandsaw (upstairs) because its blade is narrower so it can cut corners a lot easier, after that we copy cut (routered) another set of frames and faired them on the sander (the same machine as the face sander but the cylindrical one).

after that came the annoying part; setting up the frames.

the problem we have is the frames are too light so they dont want to lie flat on the ground when we clamp them to the straight edge.

the others made the sub floors (vaccum baged) and preped the hulls for the sub floors.

joining and fitting hulls

im really annoyed that ive been too busy to update my blog in nearly 2 weeks!!!
ill try to remember everything that ive been doing since the last update (laminating).

ok, so afte rwe laminated we had to cut the hulls to the centerline... we set up a jig on the frames that let us router the glass and foam to the centerline reasonably easily however it was still a pain in the back side.

here is a sketch of how we did it:

so we set up the light brown boards on the frames to a set height above the centerline (drilling them to the frames). then we slid the other board backwards and forward with the router resting on it so that the bit cut to exactly the centerline. (this was really annoying cause we got fiberglass, resin and foam dust everywhere, all through our clothes. REALLY ITCHY).

after we routered to the centerline we preped the hulls for joining:

we sanded 100mil down from each centerline, and vaccumed the whole thing, after that we pu tglue on the edges, then flipped one of the half hulls ontop of the other and drilled the frames together after we made sure they matched up.

this is the top of the hull at the join on
the centerline

once that was done we made sure the fit was tight and there was glue everywhere, we clamped the bow together to make sure it was all going to glue nicely:

after that we let it harden and came back the next day...

the coving tools we made

the hulls were reasonably well joined, we just needed to cove the inside and tape the 2 sides together with glass.

matt spent most of the day inside the hulls coving the join with bog:

after the joins were nicely coved we wet out glass stripes and the hulls and taped them together. and after that we peel plied it also.














the next week we started preping the hulls for joining to the old hulls, we cut off most of the frames, and sanded the glue on the outside off. (wednesday) we tidied up, and just did general prep for joining. matt realised that we had made the hulls too short (200mil aprox) so we slid the last 2 frames backwards and glued some more foam in and carboned and glassed and peel plied.

then thursday:

we preped for joining:

while Lei and I were lofting the beam fairings the others cut a section out of the hull so they could work inside while joining. they drilled holes in the new hulls so the glue could squish out, and they prepared a whole lot of ply strips for screwing the new hulls to the old carbon.

once we had tried the hull to see that is fitted, bogged the carbon and glass where the join will be, then we fitted them together, leveled and squared it and made sure it lined up with the old hulls perfectly.

glue in the join before screws

ply strips on the outside

ply strips on the inside

we screwed the hulls together from the bottom up while making sure the join was perfect, then we screwed the hulls onto the carbon with the ply strips on the inside and outside.