More Canoe Stuff
Aug. 25th, 2010 06:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillI am now up to about six hours of hand sanding on Constance. This is less onerous than it may sound because 1) the longboard is reasonably well set up ergonomically--I don't end up overstraining small muscles by trying to use them for long periods of time 2) it has been broken up over a couple of days.
Putting the epoxy on (and squeegeeing it off) with a painbrush seems to have worked fairly well. There is one long swipe along one sheer where I made the mistake of trying to use a squeegee on one set of drips--it took off a lot more epoxy, and left one long ridge of drips and sags above it that has required very careful attention. I will not make that mistake again. Elsewhere on the boat, the extra thickness of the epoxy makes it reasonably easy to use the longboard to sand the high spots down to match the low spots without sanding into the fiberglass. There is the feel of using the longboard to "carve" the boat out of the epoxy I slathered on.
Thank goodness for that N-95 dust mask. There is epoxy dust everywhere--every few strokes I have to stop and use a wire brush to scratch the clumped up epoxy dust off the 80 grit sandpaper. The sandpaper itself stands up to to this treatment quite well--doesn't loose its sand or get shredded by the brush, and I've used one strip (I've got adhesive-backed strips to put on the longboard) on pretty much the whole boat. However the dust goes everywhere, and since the epoxy doesn't fully cure until today, breathing it would be bad. But wearing a regular dust mask in Tennessee, even in the morning, even with the temperature (finally) under 80 degrees most of the time, would be ugly. The N-95 dust mask has a little exhalation valve in the front that means it doesn't trap quite as much water from my breath.
I still have to put more epoxy on the stems to fill the weave of the last strips of epoxy I used to reinforce the stems. I want to finish sanding the rest of the boat first, because I have gotten into the fiberglass in a couple of places and I want to try dabbing a little more epoxy on those spots at the same time, and I might as well have made all the mistakes I'm going to make on the body of the boat before I try to fix them.
Also I spent easily a half hour running around yesterday with an adjustable sawhorse trying to 1) change the height of the canoe in the canoe-lifter and 2) retract the wheels so the canoe lifter wouldn't run away down the driveway when I leaned into the longboard. Now I have clever retractable wheels, but I don't want to put a lot of strain on the mechanism so my practice has been to pick up the very end of the strongback (which the forms and the canoe are fastened to) and prop it on a sawhorse while I retract the wheels, and definitely when I extend them. In fact to extend them I have to pick up the canoe lifter, because there's no way to force the wheels down; they just flop down of themselves when I lift the end and then I brace them in place.
I would like to have a better way to pick up the canoe lifter. Preferably one that would let me forgo the sawhorse. This is probably not worth pursuing right now, as I will only be using the canoe lifter for a few more days, but the subject is very much on my mind right now and I keep coming up with partial designs and then discarding them when I realize why they won't work, or why they are too complicated to be practical.
I also need to make the cradles to hold the boat when I take it off the forms and turn it right side up. I thought I could use all those leftover 1 x 1 1/2 inch strips of low-grade white pine left over from making the workshop doors (I still love those doors. It is so much easier to roll a heavy canoe + forms out of the workshop when I have big doors.) However while the strips have good tensile and compressive strength for the job, putting them together in a lattice that will resist diagnonal forces has been a bit more of a challenge than I expected.
So I have some design work to do..
Putting the epoxy on (and squeegeeing it off) with a painbrush seems to have worked fairly well. There is one long swipe along one sheer where I made the mistake of trying to use a squeegee on one set of drips--it took off a lot more epoxy, and left one long ridge of drips and sags above it that has required very careful attention. I will not make that mistake again. Elsewhere on the boat, the extra thickness of the epoxy makes it reasonably easy to use the longboard to sand the high spots down to match the low spots without sanding into the fiberglass. There is the feel of using the longboard to "carve" the boat out of the epoxy I slathered on.
Thank goodness for that N-95 dust mask. There is epoxy dust everywhere--every few strokes I have to stop and use a wire brush to scratch the clumped up epoxy dust off the 80 grit sandpaper. The sandpaper itself stands up to to this treatment quite well--doesn't loose its sand or get shredded by the brush, and I've used one strip (I've got adhesive-backed strips to put on the longboard) on pretty much the whole boat. However the dust goes everywhere, and since the epoxy doesn't fully cure until today, breathing it would be bad. But wearing a regular dust mask in Tennessee, even in the morning, even with the temperature (finally) under 80 degrees most of the time, would be ugly. The N-95 dust mask has a little exhalation valve in the front that means it doesn't trap quite as much water from my breath.
I still have to put more epoxy on the stems to fill the weave of the last strips of epoxy I used to reinforce the stems. I want to finish sanding the rest of the boat first, because I have gotten into the fiberglass in a couple of places and I want to try dabbing a little more epoxy on those spots at the same time, and I might as well have made all the mistakes I'm going to make on the body of the boat before I try to fix them.
Also I spent easily a half hour running around yesterday with an adjustable sawhorse trying to 1) change the height of the canoe in the canoe-lifter and 2) retract the wheels so the canoe lifter wouldn't run away down the driveway when I leaned into the longboard. Now I have clever retractable wheels, but I don't want to put a lot of strain on the mechanism so my practice has been to pick up the very end of the strongback (which the forms and the canoe are fastened to) and prop it on a sawhorse while I retract the wheels, and definitely when I extend them. In fact to extend them I have to pick up the canoe lifter, because there's no way to force the wheels down; they just flop down of themselves when I lift the end and then I brace them in place.
I would like to have a better way to pick up the canoe lifter. Preferably one that would let me forgo the sawhorse. This is probably not worth pursuing right now, as I will only be using the canoe lifter for a few more days, but the subject is very much on my mind right now and I keep coming up with partial designs and then discarding them when I realize why they won't work, or why they are too complicated to be practical.
I also need to make the cradles to hold the boat when I take it off the forms and turn it right side up. I thought I could use all those leftover 1 x 1 1/2 inch strips of low-grade white pine left over from making the workshop doors (I still love those doors. It is so much easier to roll a heavy canoe + forms out of the workshop when I have big doors.) However while the strips have good tensile and compressive strength for the job, putting them together in a lattice that will resist diagnonal forces has been a bit more of a challenge than I expected.
So I have some design work to do..
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Date: 2010-08-27 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-27 07:19 pm (UTC)The folks at my local lumber store know me. Part of this is I make a point of going to the smaller store 2 blocks from my house whenever practical, and don't go to Lowes unless I have to. So when I show up and say "Hi, I need four feet of 2 x 6 but it can be in 1 foot pieces, and I need 16 square feet of plywood in pretty much any configuration," they say "let's go down to the shop and have a look at the scraps."
And it turns out scrap plywood works fine to stiffen a joint; just whap it up flat against the two pieces of wood and run a few screws in. It's not graceful, but it does the job.