Boxy Fisher Catamaran

Life seems to be full of little changes, do not be disheartened, keep at it

 

No disheartedness It's just that whatever I do I have to do by myself. Not always so easy. I am also very buzy with work stuff so unfortunately it interferes a lot with the boat stuff.

I have sanded the pins with a fine sand paper and they are smooth. The HDPE wrappingf has to go up next, then the housing has to be made around the PE.

 

I made five of the six pin bearing (HDPE) housing tonight, and with the glass wetout machine ! It took an hour and a half to do, considering that we had to swap the jig between the pins in between. The housing that is formed around the PE will be glassed into the beam, and the pin will rotate inside the PE and the PE housing.

Except for some stupid problems that was unforseen, the glass wetout machine worked pretty well. The glass was wetted as fast as one could reel it out, and would have taken much longer to do if by hand.

The problem was that since the reel of glass was cut, the unstitched end kept on spooling the loose fibers on the end around the rollers, causing a thickened part we had to cut off all the time. This wasted a lot of time. The stitched side went quite well.

 

The above pictures -

Pic 1 is a new PE drum I put a big tap on. The dispensing drum I used before had a smaller tap on and you had to wait for the resin to run out. With this size tap it's much faster decanting.

Pic 2 is where everything is ready to go.

Pic 3 is while we were glassing. You can see on the left of the glass the white is where the problem is, caused by the loose fibers spooling on the rollers.

Pic 4 is the completed pin bearing housings. The last pin is on the jig in pic 5. Of course in handling these wet pins I succeeded in pushing the wet against my short pants and against my leg. Now I HAVE to take an early monthly bath. It feels awefull.

Below is the cleaned machine, ready for the next run once some changes has been made.

 

I'm actually looking foreward to glassing the beams. My friend who helped me roll these pin housings agreed that we can make a pin in a night's time, easy.

One thing to remember is that this process has the advantage of glassing new on top of the old. Nothing can delaminate even under max force.

 

Well done sir...

 

I made some changes to the wetout machine. This was great, the glass came out with a better ratio resin and it was very smooth. My friend came over and we glassed the sixth pin bearing housing. Ten minutes and we were standing around wondering what did we forgot to do. It took longer to clean the machine than what it took to do the glassing.

The wetout machine works fantastic ! Easy and very fast. Now we are worried for when we glass the hulls that we are not going to keep up mixing the resin and hardner !

Wastage is about 500g of mixed resin. This may be reduced when wider glass is layed up, which will be 650mm wide as to the 400mm we layed up now.

Next is the beams. Also the work gets less and less. Going from six pins to four beams to two hulls

 

I made the beam's roto jig. Looking back I can't believe it took all day. At least it works quite well. The speed adjusts well and it turns from too slow to too fast. It's rawl bolted to the floor.

 

Fanie, you are an excellent and hard worker, ONLY A DAY,? You Saffa's sure work quick - - - - or is that a "biblical day" of Genesis "...one day is as 1000 years..."

.... A most excellent effort...

 

Thanks Mas, flattery gets you everywhere, but not really. I'm actually lazy, that's why I make stuff to make the work easier. Winding a beam like that by hand is going to be a lot of work and will require at least one extra person. I have to rely on 'friends' to help me wich is something I don't seem to have enough. Well, when it comes to working with fiberglass that is.

This morning my back is off... I have a nerve pinching that makes my left leg goes numb. Takes a bit of time to get it back in every morning, but once that's done we can proceed full steam ahead. North of course

The 'old' people say if you wake up one morning and you don't have a pain, or something that is off or out, then you have passed away.
I guess I'm still here... (but not all there as the English say ).

 

I've put in a rail to guide the glass machine and replaced the rubber wheels with train I mean gate wheels... The idea is to make it easier to control the transverse movement along the jig(s).

 

I finished the first beam tonight. Started at 20h00 and the beam was glassed and peel plied by 21h00. The biggest problem was keeping the resin level up, if I rev the speed control up a bit you cannot believe how fast the glass is zipped on the jig.

Cleaning the friggin glass machine took two hours. This seems to be the biggest work. The glassing on the moment is a wee-wee. Wastage again was about 500g of resin.

Since this is a new method of laying up the glass, there are a lot of unknowns. Few problems, most are sorted on the fly. Each time small things are improved.

One down, three to go.

 

One of the things that was a pain in the butt was mixing the resin and hardner. So naturally one needs something to do the mixing for you

The larger the volume of resin the more difficult it gets to mix.

I had some kind of a stand similar to a drill stand the neigbour gave me a couple of years ago. One of the DC motors I had fitted in it's clamp. I also had little air fan propellors. These were hollow since they originally goes onto a 2mm motor shaft. So I potted the hollow part with potting, drilled and tapped an 8mm thread in it. I then made a shaft that pressed onto the mixer motor shaft and the bottom end screwed into the prop. Power supply is a adjustable supply and I added a foot switch. If you step on the foot switch, the mixer spins. The resin gets flowed down and the mixing takes about 15 or so seconds, much better than when mixing by hand.

Another picture of the glassed beam. The beam is 2m500 long (400mm high and 300mm wide), it will be trimmed to 2m400 once off the jig. 28 layers of 450g woven glass there to make the 10mm thickness and required strength. The glass weighed 42kg, I will determine how much resin I used. It should be around 20 to 25kg.

 

It is now 12h40, just checked on the beam again Probably won't sleep tonight. This is what I love about polyester resin. The beam makes that tok-tok sound when you tap it, it's warm to the touch and the polyester smell is now replaced with a pleasant almond smell. The warm-to-the-touch makes the glass self cure faster.

I will leave the glass on the jig for a week. If you take it off the jig too quickly the flat sides will tend to bend inward.

Well, as you could gather by now, I an excited

 

I was just thinking. The Little Tri took me two weeks to build, and I was working my butt off. Most of the time was spent glassing. If I used the glass machine, the center hull would have taken about two hours to glass...

Now I feel like a masochist