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catsittingstillThis morning I came up with some modifications to my methods to make putting the actual strips on a little faster. Let me show you a picture:
If you click through to Flickr you can see the notes on the picture but I will summarize briefly here.
1) instead of putting the hot glue gun on the floor between applications, (because I need both hands to hold the strip firmly to the station while applying clamps--all hopefully before the hot glue sets up in four or fives seconds) I put a drywall screw into the face of each crosswise station and hung the hot glue gun off that.
2) instead of keeping all the bar clamps on the floor under the canoe, I hung the ones that will fit off the stations themselves, so I don't have to bend down and grab each one.
3) I clipped the spring clamps to the clamping ridges rather than leave them on the strongback between stations. I don't have to peer into the canoe to find them, and they are already pointing in the correct direction so I don't have to turn them around one handed.
This makes the actual stripping go a little faster.
However I've been having to use the heat gun more extensively to match the bowing and twisting that the strip has to do on the forms. This has been working pretty well (read: I haven't burned myself or scorched anything irreplaceable, or set anything at all on fire) but it takes time.
Plus sometimes when I'm heating the white pine I see it suddenly develop little flecks of wetness which then sink into the wood and either evaporate or are absorbed. I think these are tiny pitch pockets, and I wonder if this batch of white pine has more pitch pockets than the last. Or if the last had lots of tiny pitch pockets too that I missed. Hopefully they are too small to cause a problem, and hopefully where I've toasted the wood I've cooked them out in any case, but it makes me uneasy.
Plus remember those flecked planks I was calling "seal marked"? Those flecks are the exact same color as some of the places that turn wet and then evaporate. So I wonder if all those flecks are pitch pockets. And if, in that I case, about a third of my planks are not safe to use.
I hadn't included any seal marked planks in the boat to this point, and I think I have enough planks without using the seal marked ones, so I've been avoiding them. But it's annoying to not know whether they're a problem or not. If they're a delamination hazard, I can't give them to Martin or some other unsuspecting boatbuilder--I'll have to use them for a non-boat project or possibly just throw them away.
Anyway--I got six strips on the boat today but I started at 8:30 am and didn't finish till 5:00 pm (with an hour and a quarter off in the middle to run errands.) I squeezed in a walk right before sunset, and an hour of practice after that, but now I am ready to Fall Over.
And tomorrow I need to do the same thing again.
If you click through to Flickr you can see the notes on the picture but I will summarize briefly here.
1) instead of putting the hot glue gun on the floor between applications, (because I need both hands to hold the strip firmly to the station while applying clamps--all hopefully before the hot glue sets up in four or fives seconds) I put a drywall screw into the face of each crosswise station and hung the hot glue gun off that.
2) instead of keeping all the bar clamps on the floor under the canoe, I hung the ones that will fit off the stations themselves, so I don't have to bend down and grab each one.
3) I clipped the spring clamps to the clamping ridges rather than leave them on the strongback between stations. I don't have to peer into the canoe to find them, and they are already pointing in the correct direction so I don't have to turn them around one handed.
This makes the actual stripping go a little faster.
However I've been having to use the heat gun more extensively to match the bowing and twisting that the strip has to do on the forms. This has been working pretty well (read: I haven't burned myself or scorched anything irreplaceable, or set anything at all on fire) but it takes time.
Plus sometimes when I'm heating the white pine I see it suddenly develop little flecks of wetness which then sink into the wood and either evaporate or are absorbed. I think these are tiny pitch pockets, and I wonder if this batch of white pine has more pitch pockets than the last. Or if the last had lots of tiny pitch pockets too that I missed. Hopefully they are too small to cause a problem, and hopefully where I've toasted the wood I've cooked them out in any case, but it makes me uneasy.
Plus remember those flecked planks I was calling "seal marked"? Those flecks are the exact same color as some of the places that turn wet and then evaporate. So I wonder if all those flecks are pitch pockets. And if, in that I case, about a third of my planks are not safe to use.
I hadn't included any seal marked planks in the boat to this point, and I think I have enough planks without using the seal marked ones, so I've been avoiding them. But it's annoying to not know whether they're a problem or not. If they're a delamination hazard, I can't give them to Martin or some other unsuspecting boatbuilder--I'll have to use them for a non-boat project or possibly just throw them away.
Anyway--I got six strips on the boat today but I started at 8:30 am and didn't finish till 5:00 pm (with an hour and a quarter off in the middle to run errands.) I squeezed in a walk right before sunset, and an hour of practice after that, but now I am ready to Fall Over.
And tomorrow I need to do the same thing again.
