Foredeck Patch

Today I bonded in the foredeck.  With a little help from Sally and Jilann, Thanks!  The part didn't fit perfect but good enough.  I can trim and fair the thing in tomorrow.  We had terrific ribs tonight followed by a rum and coke and then the three of us glued that part in the best we could.  I think it'll turn out great.  I'll fair that piece in tomorrow, throw in a couple of layers of glass to secure everything in and we will be good to go for gel coating.  I should have gotten a picture.  Sally surfing the bow and Jilann doing her best filling in the gaps while I added a few aluminum rivets to tie flanges together.

Until tomorrow.  It is good to have this hole filled and ready to make some good progress.  The weather this weekend is awesome.

Making the Foredeck

Today I laid up the foredeck with Jilann.  It was nice to have an extra set of hands and she was very helpful.  It looks pretty good and is still curing.  I hope I got the proportion of hardener to resin right.  I toasted the suction hose with resin and had to throw it away and I created a bunch of work for using too much resin.

Better safe than sorry though the part is dense with resin which is alright the part should be cured by tomorrow.

I also built a framework for the tarp today that will allow me to work on the deck while the tarp is on, maybe.

Foredeck Surface Mold and Core

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It doesn't look like much but this is the foredeck core and improvised deck mold.  I used thin plywood to capture the exterior shape of the deck.  Then froze that shape with five layers of glass.  The surface is then sealed with carefully laid out packaging tape.  Tomorrow is glassing and bagging the assembly together.  For some reason I had one of the chamfers backward in my head and had to trim the balsa more than once to get it right.  A little hot glue to keep the small pieces together.  The plan is 2-core-2 with heavy woven glass.  Then 555 resin.  I also printed out the blank templates that will be used for tracing the main cabin cutouts.  Smoked Acrylic is the current plan here.  A thanks goes out to Paul Patterson at Fisheries for hooking me up with an account and in general helping me out a bunch.  (The 3m marine specialist)

Farewell Ranger Minto

Goodbye Minto.  You have taught me much.  The money you bring in will be used wisely.

Foredeck repair before

Here goes nothing.  Today I will take on the the foredeck cutout that needs patching.  I have made some fairing sticks to pick up the compound curvature of the deck.

Scrap the fairing stick approach. To do this foredeck right I have decided to create a basic mold of the exterior surface of the deck.  It will take longer but the results in the end should be better.  I will update this post with pictures as this develops.  A successful trip to fisheries and I now have a solar vent and other small inspection ports to fill up an open hole in the cockpit that once housed a manual bilge pump.  My goal is to get her watertight before fall is here. Today I heard from a dear friend Jonathan with encouragement.  I look forward to getting out there and working tactics like we did on the Blake Island race two years ago...Until tomorrow.

Let the Blog Begin

The restoration of Blizzard thus far has been great, a little harder than anticipated but well worth the effort.  This is the beginning of the blog but I have been at it now for over a month and I'm please with the progress.  I've completed the de-coring of the cockpit on both the starboard and port sides.  The dust, heat, and fatigue while working overhead was quite challenging and I'm glad to have this behind me.  The decay of the core was actually pretty minimal but it is good to have this removed because it would have only gotten worse.  I have bonded the new core into place and I've encapsulated it with two heavy layers of glass which is a combination of unidirectional and layers of matte.  This material was a life saver and I have learned how to glass overhead.  The patchwork method has worked well and was really the only way it could be effectively done.  The homemade vacuum pump is doing it's job.

Today the Audi sold....  Bitter sweet but now on to a truck which I'm looking forward to.

Tomorrow I begin to the process of repairing the foredeck.  The deck has been prepared.  Looking forward to a weekend of great progress!