Making big gains on the boat and the shop. We have some more help in the shop Nick. He has done a huge amount of work in the shop taking it from Sketchey Barn to Nice Wood Shop. The cradle Base and now all the supports are cut. Now i just need to mount the supports to the base and then bight the bullet and buy the hull materials and start building something that actually looks like a boat!
Attempting to cut out some fair curves.
Cradle supports are in place but not bolted down.
The shop after it was cleaned with walls and benches added!
So the base of the cradle is done. From the transom to F110 its 7 feet wide. Then it angles in to about 1 foot past the bow. The Cross members are spaced at each bulkhead. Now i will be adding plywood at each cross member to mirror the shape of the bulkhead at each location. This should help with making sure the hull is the correct shape and each bulkhead lands at the correct elevation. I used a laser and a chalk line to keep everything straight and true.
My miter saw wont cut angles that extreme so i added a little piece so i could attach the "bow" pieces.
So i started on my cradle. I plan to build a support for the boat at each bulkhead at the correct height and shape using the bulkhead shape + 1/4 inch for the plywood. This should allow the boat to be the correct shape. I will have more on my design as i build more.
Doing some serious math! Trying to figure out all the leingths to cut up the 2x4s.
Beer helps with math.
Here is the base of the cradle. This is from frame 214 to 89 its 7 feet wide. There is one cross member for each bulkhead. One is not shown.
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.
