I finished the first round of fairing on my keel foil. I can now pass the template the entire way down the foil. Also we cut the notches in each side to lay the 4"x1/8" carbon strips down each side.
My friend Ben from Newengland Boat Works stoped by to give me a few pointers and get his sand on.
Fairing with a good longboard and 32 grit paper does quick work.
Cutting the slices in for the the carbon strips.
This is by far the coolest tool ever for this job!
Ben Hand Planing off the extra material left behind by his Track Saw.
Next step. Fill that hole with Uni Carbon!
I will say just talking with someone for a few hours who is an experienced performance boat builder and knowlageble with carbon and fiberglass was a HUGE help. I got allot of good ideas and am excited to get my hull under way!
I decided to go with a single pour bulb instead of halves. I dont have any awesome technical reason for doing this besides it seemed like one solid bulb would be better than two bolted togeather.
The video below is not my video but i used the basic principles of this video for my pour. Bolting the mold halves togeather is super important. We didnt bolt them tight enough and the weight of the lead will actually lift the top half of the mold off the bottom and let lead out inbetween the halves.
Here is a video of my crucible test using water. The only thing i added was a handle to the pipe. This is just threaded rod and a threaded angle from a plumbing store.
After the Crucible was built i decided to cut my big chunks of lead down into smaller ones to make it faster to melt. I dont know if this helped or not. Cutting lead is a pain in the a$$ so we decided to use our wood splitter and shear it apart it worked great!
Here is a short video of mealting the lead. We used a standard turkey fryer and a ground torch. we went thru about 3 standard propane tanks it took slightly over an hour to get all the lead melted and no chunks floating around or stuck in the corners.
Here are a few pictures of the process.
Warming up the Concrete mold in the powdercoating oven. We slowley warmed it up to about 245 degrees.
Raw Lead Before Melting. We filled up the crucible to make sure it could take the weight.
Myself mealting the lead.
The mold just after the pour.
Here is with 1/2 the mold removed.
The moment we started taking it apart my mold just crumbled. I would recommend wire mesh that might help hold it togeather.
Here is the bulb fresh out of the mold.
She is a bit heavy. Time to start fairing and put her on a diet! I am thinking this should weigh about 165 lbs all said and done.
Started cutting off the pour and vent holes with a sawsall.
Took awhile but got them all cut off.
Here it is in comparrison to my plug.
Using a crappy rasp from auto zone to start shaping and getting the crap off the mold. It works amazingly well and fast. It only took 2 hours or so to clean up my bulb.
Beer Count: 3 (i was pouring molten lead give me a break)
So i started building the crucible to melt my lead in. We had a large sheet of something like 12 gauge steel lying around the shop so i cut it up bent it and welded it into a box. Here are some pictures.
Plasma cutting is the way to go!
Need to use a straight edge tho.
Nice clean cut. So much easier to weld when the edges are clean and straight.
Built a template out of plexi using a bandsaw. Cutting on a band saw was much more acurate than using a jig saw the jig saw bounces and makes it hard to keep smooth. I had to epoxy a tab over the tail edge where i started and finshed my cut with the bandsaw.
This is as far as i have made it.
Pretty good fit!
Just taking it spot by spot to try to get this thing the correct shape all the way down. Id say another 10-15 hours of fairing and il be able to add the graphite strips then fair that then 10oz cloth.
Well we got the Keel Foil laminated last night i definatly recommend you do this with at least one other person. I did it with a friend of mine and it still was a huge amount of epoxy and filler and just a lot to handle by yourself.
This Link is a great article on building a foil. This is what i used to direct my build and definatly recommend reading it.
Brad Spreading out the West Systems High Denity filler.
Wood is notched for the 6' stainless 1/2" rod then filled with epoxy and high density filler.
All Glued up.
We gave up on this race at the upwind mark and started drinking. Then we caught a awesome shift and ended up winning. Thought it only be right to drink out of the cup we won while drinking.
Took the mold apart last night and everything seems alright.
Starting to take the mold apart.
Well lets hope i don't need to make another mold.
The issue with the plug not coming out in one piece. When i built the plug The tip and tail are not perfectly in line with the widest point. When you bury the plug into the concrete you need to bury it up to the ends or the next pour will wrap around the tip and tail and encase them in that half. So what happened is that my first pour went past the widest part of my mold and held it in tight.
Here you can see the overhang it caused. I need to sand.grind this down so i can get the lead out once i pour that.
Going to let the mold dry then add some plaster to get it nice and smooth.
Mark and Matt helping my cut up the Cedar 2x4's for the keel foil. I would recommend using Cedar 2x6's or bigger. These worked but its very close to not reaching the sizes you need.
So after doing a fair amount of research let me share the different ideas and opinions with building this thing.
There are basically three different options for core material.
Mahogany- Heaviest/Strongest
Cedar- Medium Weight/Medium Strength
Foam- Lightest/Weakest.
Using Mahogany is definatly the safest route it is verry strong and verry dense. The issue is its heavy and verry dificult to fair.
Foam needs to be wraped in 7/10 layers of carbon to gain the streingth needed and not being up to speed with carbon yet and not wanting to drop alot of money on the carbon i decided to run with cedar to hopefully land somewhere in the middle. Not super heavy like mahogany but strong enough and easy to build.
I also am running 1/2" Stainless rod all the way thru the foil. When i ripped the 2x4's apart i made a notch in two of the pieces to allow my stainless rod to sit inside of it. When i epoxy the pieces togeather i will epoxy the rod in with them using High Denity filler same as i will to glue the wood togeather. I just like the idea of having the bulb rest on Steel Rods and not having that pressure on the light weight cedar.
