Archive for the 'deck joint' Category
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
Plasterers rock!
Almost a century ago, when someone wanted fancy pants molding (or moulding as everyone outside of the US calls it) in their home they didn’t go to home depot and buy some extruded plastic rods and nail them up. They hired a plasterer to make a profile that they wanted and use plaster to literally mould up their fancy molding (get it, mould-ing).
Fast forward a 100 years later, boats are being made out of a moldable goo called resin, a guy with a big job wants to shave some time off his project; plasterer techniques to the rescue! It took a day of trial and error to get it down, but now that I have, there is almost zero fairing to do. Using the profile makes the entire surface uniform so there is no need to use a long board. I let the goo cure, and go at it with the half sheet. I’ll hopefully get both of the joints done before it gets too cold.
Monday, October 29th, 2007
My new best friends
Hi everyone, I’d like for you to meet my new friends, DeWalt “Heavy” Grinder and Porter “Half Sheet” Sander. Jack took a look at my big job and puny sanders and hooked us all up! Thanks Jack!
No, seriously, I can not tell you enough how amazing an 8″, 2 Hp, soft backed pad disk grinder is. What would have taken me 3 hours took only 30 minutes! The half-sheet sander is like a super rough long board and lets me rough the whole thing out nice and quick. At this rate, if the weather holds I might be able to have the whole boat faired and ready to prime before the winter! woah!
Sunday, October 21st, 2007
port-side deck joint
While I was doing this project I realized that this is the first improvement project that I have done on the boat. So far every project to date has been a repair of some sort of damage whereas this is to prevent any further damage and improve the strength of the joint.
I was off to a great start and got about half way down the boat when I realized that I didn’t have enough fairing compound to cover the fiberglass. This meant that if I laid up the joint today, I would have to grind a bunch of it off next week so I could get the fairing putty to stick. Instead I did only about 1/3 of the joint with the materials on hand and made a mental note to order more materials tomorrow. Regardless, this process went super smoothly and I’ll probably be able to finish the entire joint with one more day of work (if the weather holds out). Read the rest of this entry »
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
Back on the job
After a week at a desk, grinding and fairing feels like pure heaven. True, the amazing weather helped a bit but it still felt really good. I went sans-cast by wearing an old set of hiking boots and lacing them up nice and tight. At the end of the day everything BUT the break hurt. Seems that my foot has become lazy during its time off.
I finished the entire starboard side deck joint and covered it in fairing putty. I don’t think I’m going to get to actually fairing the joint smooth before winter but it feels great to get that side done. Tomorrow I pull off the stainless rubrail on the port side and start the same process. Hopefully it’ll take me a lot less time.
