America to Japan Crossing - The Trimaran |
| Ama - Step 7 |
| Building an Ama (Glassing) |
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Who said you need to be in the water to fly a hull. Here is our lifting system that is rigged up. It uses 2 pulleys on each run and makes a easy 3 to 1 system. The system lifts two 8 foot boards, each board sits under 2 cross battens. Each batten has a smaller batten at the width of the hull to connect a 8 inch wide strip of plastic tarp the wraps under the hull and to the other side. It seemed to work very well, I was even able to undo a tarp to sand in that area. |
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A good view of our sunshade (we have one at each end), with Miki sanding off any extra bonding comp that might poke holds in the vacuum bag. At this time we also put packing tape on all the stations to make sure they also are smooth. |
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Here is the first use of our bagging cart. Vacuum bag on the bottom, perf on top and bleeder in the middle. The vacuum bag was pulled and then opened and rolled on the keel side. Once the hull was lowered we filled all the holes from screws with a thickened epoxy bog, this was done just before glassing so that we would have a really good bond to the first glass layer and reduced the amount of preparation. |
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Here is all the glass measured, cut, labeled, weighted, and put into plastic bags with labels at to what layer it will be put down in. The total weight is about 54 lbs. of glass, which means we should only need about 54 lbs of epoxy to wet out that much glass. The final mix on the part after vacuum bagging should be 60% glass and 40% epoxy. |
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Here we are, glassing. T.C., Brad, Sam, Miki and I working on layer 3. The first layer is made up of one 0 deg and one 45 deg, put down bow to transom, then at a 45 deg angle going deck to keel. The second and third are 0 deg only covering certain areas that we pre-marked on the part with a big black sharpie and on the boards holding the stations. The fourth layer is only in a few spots where the arms will attach and are made up of a 0 and 45. |
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| 02/09/2003 |
Major problems in glassing the Ama. In our first attempt at glassing a large part we ran into a few problems.
When putting the first coat if epoxy down to wet the foam it drank almost 5kg of epoxy for the 39 x 5 foot area. Then we attempted to layup the glass dry and let the epoxy wet it. We also had issues with air pockets under the glass. After doing a few layers dry we switched to prepregnating the glass and things started to look better. Total time to layup all the glass was 3 1/2 hours, since it was kind of cold out and the epoxy had not gelled.
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Lastly when we closed the vacuum bag and started to pull a vacuum, we had no results. After finding all the holes in the seal, we could still not get it to pressure. At 11:30pm we turned off the vacuum pumps and called it a night. |
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| 02/10/2003 |
We called Kurt to ask for help and recommendations; he said "If it looks bad, pull it off and save the foam". We then opened the vacuum bag and pulled the peelply. It was a disaster!! |
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Miki and I spent the next 10 hours pulling all the glass off the hull. |
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This SUCKED in a way I can not explain. This started out easy, but as the epoxy cured more it started getting harder to pull up the glass. |
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A mistake made was not getting space suits for this part of the disaster, we had little glass fibers all over us. After a cold shower, we could still feel glass needles all over us. Miki did better then I in this, after a few days I had a glass rash. |
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This was a sad but needed lesson in our project, the hard work of pulling the glass up help cool the fire in our minds. |
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We filled 26 trash bags with cured solid glass strips. The trash guy was very cool and let us put them in the cans over and over. What we thought was going to be a 7 trash day project was solved in one. |
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That bring us to sanding, sanding was going to be a minimum because we were vacuum bagging. Sanding really sucks, sanding a curved surface sucks even more. I started with the palm sander, then the bigger vibrating sander, then the belt sander, No luck at all this epoxy is solid. A quick trip back to Home Depot and I got the Makita 5000rpm disk sander and 24 40 grit disks. This is the correct tool for the job and takes the epoxy off with no effort. The problem is you need to be really careful not to remove more foam then needed. |
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| 3/23/2003 |
The detail work that was needed in the curved area took a few weeks. Once the flat sections were reached new gear was very much in need, due to the amount of dust that was now being made. Again, a quick run to Lowe's got me nothing but pissed that I just didn't go straight to Home Depot, that aside I dropped the cash for a full-face 3M respirator. Now, with the sanding on the inside completed the only things remaining is to flip the hull and sand the epoxy that dripped down though cracks and screw holes that were missed and some foam repairs. |
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