[ Home Page ]    [ History ]    [ The Project ]

Project Log:  Monday, May 30, 2011

After lightly sanding the new fiberglass, I removed the new parts from their molds.  The flanges released easily, but in both cases this also caused the body of the mold--which I'd only hot-glued and lightly filleted to the plywood bases--to come off along with the finished part.  This was no particular problem, as it took only a bit of prying to release the remaining portions of the mold.

On the first piece, I broke apart one side of the mold during this removal process, but kept it together on the second piece.  The finished parts looked excellent.



    

    

At some point during the construction of these things, I realized I'd made an error, albeit minor.  I'd designed each recess to contain two fill pipe assemblies, and made the two pieces identical.  However, I'd intended to enlarge one of the recesses to contain three fill pipes, the extra one to service the under-cockpit fuel tank.

Rather than start over, I decided to "jumbo-ize" one of the molded parts by cutting the piece in half and inserting a center section to widen it the necessary amount.  To this end, I reassembled one of the molds--the second one, where the center section had come out in one intact piece--and quickly re-filleted two of the sides with some green acrylic putty I had on hand from something else.   I rewaxed the mold before continuing.

Then, I laminated about an 8" wide section of "middle" over the top of the mold, repeating the basic laminate schedule I'd employed on the original parts, though this time I applied all the layers at the same time, since the piece was so easy to mold.

    

I marked off a 1-1/2" wide flange around the recesses on the finished pieces and trimmed away the excess with a saw.

    

Total Time Today:  1.25 hours

< Previous | Next >


The Motorsailer Project
Site design and content ©2010-2015 by Timothy C. Lackey.  All rights reserved.

Please notify me of broken or missing links or other site issues.
You can always find every day's project log links on The Project page.

Questions and comments | Home Page
V1.0 went live on 8/26/10