Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Stringer Creation

We began making the stringers on Saturday, after the Wolfpack sh*t the bed against OSU. The stringer mold is made out of 2 eight foot sections of 3/4" OSB and a 2x4 eight feet long on the top section and with spacers on the bottom - all sandwiched in between the two pieces of OSB.

After that was constructed we wrapped it in 6mil plastic and stapled it down tight.
Here are a couple of shots:



We have 5 layers of woven roven in the stringers and all of them were generous wetted out with 2:1 slow epoxy.
The method of the madness went like:
6 oz
18 oz
24 oz
18 oz
6 oz
All of this was "cinched" down and heat lamps were applied for remainder of the night.
Here are a couple of pics of the process and finished 1/2 of a stringer (plan is to make 8 of the these for the 4 stringers):





Time and spouses have kept us out of the glass work for the this week, but will be posting another stringer update once all of them have been created and put in.
Still waiting on the estimates for the gas tank...if you know a fabrication shop please shoot me an email.

Monday, September 13, 2004

Hull Prep.

No pictures again this week. But we have good news, 95% of the cloth, epoxy and foam has arrived and we are just about to start building the stringer forms and stringers.
In anticipation of laying the stringers up, we ground the hull down this weekend in order to assure a solid bond for the stringers and new glass. We also went ahead and removed the remaining two stringers from the original construction..We had thought about leaving them in, since the wood was solid but on second thought, we decided to SawzAll them go with our "woodless" stringer design throughout (not really our idea, classicmako.com plug)
I will post pics of the molds and the play by play with the stringer creation if that starts this week.