Two years ago(!), when I bought the plywood for the hull and started the build I threw a scrap piece behind the shed in the muck, where it has been soaking in the rain and drying together with some leaves and mud ever since. This is how it looks like today:
No signs of mold, rot or delamination, that counts as good enough where I come from:) I'm not going to do the famous boil test. Not planning on boiling the boat either...
laters
Today was the day I managed to start working on the cockpit. It is not too difficult, the cutting part, but it does require some planning as there are many corners and joints. I'm trying to make sure the joints will be load bearing in the direction that most makes sense for the particular joint.
I have cut out some venting holes:
The surfaces that will be walked on (and jumped on from the cabin top) will be reinforced with some beams - the design specifies 8mm plywood for all surfaces here and does not call for any bracing - I don't know, the 8mm ply seems a bit too thin to leave like that. It will gain some additional strength after it is glassed over, but I'm going to reinforce everything anyway. I will not be installing those before at least drilling the holes for the lower rudder gudgeon as it will be a pain trying to reach the transom through the vents in the bulkhead after everything is closed up.
The whole thing came out very symmetric, I could use the pattern I made for one side for making both pieces with a very good fit so, again, stressing out over the layout and the dimensions of the frames payed out again.
Tomorrow I'll start gluing everything up, but it looks like It will take more than 1 day as I want to cut some more limber holes in the side assemblies.
ciao.
Since no progress has been made as I'm waiting for some parts to get delivered (glad I still have that excuse at least), I'll share a link to the album with all the pictures of the build. No explanations, sly remarks or attempts at humor. Just pictures:
enjoy.
It's been a while since last I updated my blog. Or even worked on the boat... Time to resume activities. But. Winter is coming. And it's getting cold in the shop.
Mindful of how much I hated working with cold syrupy resin last winter I decided I need to make a heat box to keep the glue toasty and thin. In the spirit of DIY and due to the fact I could not find one that would let me control both the temperature of the box AND the heating element (maybe they are there, but i'm sure they are expensive) I decided to make one. The heating element temperature needs to be limited for the obvious reason of not melting a plastic jar of resin, that would just be counterproductive. And I want to be able to use whatever heater I have at hand: light bulbs, whatever. I do happen to have a 200W printer heat bed, but that also likes to get pretty hot.
Requirements:
- Fun. Check. That has been had. The geeky kind.
- Cheap. Not sure if in the end it actually was cheap(-er) than commercial options, but hey, see point 1.
- Silent. None of that clickety-clack of mechanical relays. Hence a cheap chinese SSR comes into play. It is rated to 25A, I would not trust it beyond 10, in reality it will not control more than 1 or 2. Should be aok.
- Safe. As in: not melting down anything. Not the resin, not itself. So the temperature of the heater must be under control, and the temperature of self (as in: the solid state relay) must be kept in check. And since the latter is of the chinesium persuasion and likes to go up in flames - an additional safety (mechanical) relay comes to the rescue to disconnect the whole thing if overheated.
- Modular enough to be easily serviceable. That includes the micro controller - I picked an Arduino pro mini - simple, well supported and cheap.
- Simple interface: just one rotating knob to set everything (temperatures, hysteresis setting, saving defaults and the like).
The prototype (using resistors as heaters pressed against dallas temperature sensors) looks like this:
Instead of soldering everything on a prototyping board (which I considered) I designed a proper(?) PCB and had a well known chinese PCB manufacturer stamp out 5 of them (that is the minimal amount I could order). The boards will be arriving in a couple of days and if I did not make any oopsies in the layout I will have 4 perfectly good spares if anyone will be interested:
The code to go with the setup is published on github. I'm sure there is plenty of thermostat projects out there, but this one is mine and mine alone:)
Now on to trying to finish Piglet's cockpit. I'll post when done (in a few days).
doei.
Finally the workshop stands again. After a lot of busywork and other projects I finally managed (with some help) to prep a place for the ten...
