Major catchup, been slack again at keeping this up to date

So sanding has gone on forever but there has been plenty going on around it.


Wish I had filled the staple holes before I started sanding.

The ECU for the engine has arrived back from Russia, so I have been slowly working on a temporary wiring setup so that I can try to start the engine.  This is about 60% complete, and as soon as my fuse holder arrives I should be able to finish that in short order.  This leave only the fuel system to sort out, I need to get a pump and some fuel hose.  Once those are in place in theory I can start it.  I'll post a you-tube video if that when the time comes.

The transmission;  I have finally sold the transmission I have, and whats more I got exactly what I paid for it minus "TradeMe" fees.  TradeMe is like eBay only way more popular here in NZ.  The money from this has financed various directions recently.

Stain;  so I got some test pots, and then cleaned up a couple of left over bits of veneer.  I stained these and left them to dry. I wasn't particularly impressed with results.  I then coated them in penetrating epoxy and that made them look a bit better.  Finally I coated one piece in fibreglass.  This piece had stripes, a strip of one colour, a plain unstained stripe and then the other colour.  By the time I had fibreglassed it I had made my mind up.  No stain.

Fibreglassing, so as I mentioned above I fibreglassed a scrap of veneer as part of my stains testing.  Regretablly this I think made me a little over confident.  Fibreglassing this small piece was very easy and came out exaclty like the books / video's etc said it should.

So I prepared one side of the bottom for glassing and got stuck in.  It started out well, but to be honest didn't end well.  I made several mistakes, one of which was using fast harder instead of slow.  The temperature at the time was below the minimum for the slow hardener as per the data sheet, but the fast just went off plain to fast.

Also I used rollers, which seems to push the cloth rather than push the epoxy into the cloth, and lastly I tried to do it all myself.  So the end result, the first 3rd looks pretty good, but it get progressivly more ugly as you progress to the stern.  I had lumps of epoxy go off underneath the cloth, not big ones but enough to produce definelty lumps in the surface.

So learning from my mistakes, and talking to a couple of guys at work I changed my tactics.  I used slow hardener, I used a 6" squeege, and I enlisted my daughter as cheif epoxy mixer.  What a huge differnce,  the other side of the bottom went very easily, with minimal stress and has come out looking exactly like the books / videos / pictures suggest it should.

So my job for next week is to re-assess the first side and decide whether it is workable or whether it has to come off.

Sanding, well that is finished now, well wood sanding, I have plenty of epoxy resin sanding ahead of me.  The job seemed to go on forever, and I made a few goofs in the early stages using the disc sander, but like most things on this boat building journey you learn from your mistakes, and proceed.  I am quite certain its not as good as many of the boats on the Glen-L forum,  but it aint half bad either.

So far I have now coated one side with penetrating epoxy and to my eyes anyway it looked beautiful.


The plan,

A bit of sanding and then I can apply the 2nd and 3rd coats of epoxy.
A bit of sanding and I can apply penetrating epxoy to the other side and transom.
Under coat the bottom.
A couple of coats minimum of varnish on the sides.
Final coat on the bottom.

Then the flip, which at this stage I am hoping to achieve before the end of september, if not sooner.

In between the above I hope to get the engine started and of course I have to build a cradle for the boat to sit on.

Sanding & finding the waterline

So sanding is progressing,  creates a huge mess as the fine dust goes everywhere.  It is starting to look very nice.  Once you get the excess glue from the joints it transforms into looking pretty cool.  Some of my joints between strakes are really good, such that you can barely see the join.  Others..well not so much, but it is what it is and I'm not going to worry about it.  Plus I suspect the joins will become a bit less visible when I stain it.  I have so far done about half the boat with 40 grit, and the other half at 60 grit,  plan

I went stain shopping yesterday, came away with a couple of test pots.  My plan is to get a couple of off cuts and then try staining and sealing with epoxy, and finally varnish to see what the final result should look like and also test compatibility between products.

 

 

Sanding is on-going, creates one heck of a mess.  Thankfully the wife has thus far been putting up with it, but don't want to push that to far.

 

Also been working on finding the water line.  I read a few accounts of how to do it.  Some using lasers, some a clear tube with water and others a stick of a datum (usually the ground). So I read all about these various techniques and thought I would use the laser method as I happen to have a laser level and tripod left over from building a deck a few years.  So consult the plans I located the waterline at the fore and aft end of the boat and marked these on the hull.  I then set the laser up so that by swivelling it on the tripod I could land the laser dot on both of these marks.  From there its a simple case of swivelling the laser and marking the hull at intervals.  So I did all of this and it was pretty easy and went according to plan.

 

However after doing a dummy run at this I came away with a nagging doubt, and it took me a couple of days to figure out what it was. The Monaco has a setup level, which is the true bottom of the stringers (top of them while upside down).  From this level the water line is located at a distance from this level at frame 0 and frame 8.  However the distance at these two location is different, which means the water line is not level when the boat is on the building form.  So I am thinking how can people be using a clear hose filled with water to find the level, unless of course the boat they are building does site on the building frame such that the water line is level, OR I am reading / doing something wrong.  This is something I haven't resolved yet.