Back to Work

Spring is here and its time to get back out and work on old Skidbladnir.

We spent the winter dreading the next step in the process.....sanding the interior of the boat. It just seemed like such a monumental and miserable task. Like they say in the book, there really do seem to be acres of interior.

We finally talked over our strategy and settled again on a 'strategic'/efficient method. We had some lumps and bumps and in some places our epoxy coats were a little thin and the weave was still visible. I think this is because we did most of our laminating at 90 degrees and the stuff ran quite a bit. With this in mind we decided to do a very very mild sanding job. Rather than have to patch a bunch of stuff and possibly mess with the structural integrity we decided just to knock the lumps off the top of the epoxy and build up using putty to fair the inside of the boat.

We were so dreading sanding and it took us all of maybe a half hour. We also strategically decided that anything hidden was not worth sanding a whole bunch so we focused specifically on the exposed areas and those above the floor level. Everything else will just get a nice scuff with some scotch-brite just before we paint.

We sanded with 80 and then went back and scuffed all the glossy spots with scotch-brite to give it some bite. From there we went on the fairing putty.
I brought home some Q-Cel and Cab-o-Sil from work so we could make a nice lightweight sand-able putty. T mixed it to the consistency of a very light frosting and we spread it on with drywall trowels. T estimated the ratio of Q-Cel to Cab-o-Sil at somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 leaning towards a little more Q-Cel and and little less Cab-o-Sil

We did not do a beautiful job, but we did one coat, waited 24 hrs (in a cold garage this meant that the epoxy was just a tad tacky the next day) and reapplied. At this point we wanted as smooth as possible an application, but if its not perfect we can always sand and add more. The next step will be the tedious application of sanding and guide coat until we have a beautiful smooth surface on the interior of the boat. When we put the roof on and flip the boat we will have to go through the whole process again (sigh).

As a last note.... being housebound and waiting for the cold and the rain to stop T decided to build a mini Pocketship. I scaled the plywood layout from the study plans and printed them on 11x17s at work and then he cut them out from airplane balsa. It was almost comical how fast the little balsa hull went together compared to the full sized hull.

12" ish long pocketship

Here's some of the lamination video from the fall that I never got around to processing combined with the segments from the last couple days showing putty.