The foils are planed to shape. This went better than expected but I had a couple of problems with the plane tearing out bits of the soft cedar. Maybe my plane is not sharp enough but it's as sharp as I can get it. The clear epoxy will hide the nicks, I think. A bit of sanding to finish off and the foils are ready for glassing.
Daggerboard ready for glass
Rudder ready for glass
Dropped it on the trailing edge #$%@#$!!!
Scarfed in a tiny piece of cedar to fix. I'm sure this wont be the last ding repair.
I decided to vacuum bag the glass onto the foils. This is not necessary at all but I have all the equipment from when I used to vacuum bag composite model airplane wings and the process is pretty fun. One big advantage is that the vacuum forces the glass around the tip contours of the foils and you don't have to do hardly any sanding before the final epoxy flow coats. I did the rudder first and found out that cedar will absorb a lot of epoxy under vacuum. While the layup turned out nice and tight, the glass is a bit dry. This will still work just fine but it's not perfect. I coated the centerboard with epoxy and let it kick before vacuum bagging the glass and the resin ratio was good.
Rudder remover from bag. Just need to trim the edges with a sharp box cutter, sand the remaining ridge and it's ready for the final epoxy coats. No sanding of epoxy lumps and drips and runs.
The glass is formed tightly around the edges of the foil.
Total time to date 70hrs.
No comments:
Post a Comment