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Nice work Dave! cant wait to see the out drive and engine go back in her!
strick
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Me too, Chuck, but it’s gonna be a while. I was hoping to have her ready for a trip to the Keys mid-June, but I don’t think I’m gonna make it. I’m running out of weekends.
But I have made progress. I talked my buddy Dennis into coming up from Lauderdale for a long weekend to lend a hand. He’s pretty handy with a set of tools and will keep on working as long as there’s a cold Budweiser available.
So I ordered a disc brake kit for my trailer. Mike Rawdon at
trailerpartsdepot.com was very helpful. When I ordered on Monday, I told him I wanted to be able to install them that weekend and he made the extra effort to get the shipment out the same day. When Dennis got here, he went to work on them. He even read the instructions.
While Denny was working on the trailer, I started cutting out parts for the molds for the outer boxes for my fish box and live well. Then we put the molds together and I worked on lacquer and clay fillets while Dennis cut the glass mat and biax.
I ran out of clay and had to make a run to the craft store. Found a neat tool that really speeds the process. It’s a clay extruder and it comes with a bunch of different plates for different extruded shapes. So I could make clay strips two feet long at a time. Definitely worth the $15 cost.
I took the week off, and Dennis had to be back at work on Wednesday, so I did the gelcoat and layup on the boxes after he headed south. I got some instruction from the shop foreman at
Mirage manufacturing , where I’ve been buying my gelcoat, poly resin, and 2408 biax. We talked about my issues with alligatoring in the gelcoat and it looks like I was spraying it on too thin. He recommended 12 to 15 mils, so I got out the calculator and figured my gelcoat quantities instead of guesstimating. This seems to have solved the problem. The only spots where I had any alligatoring on the boxes was where I couldn’t get good coverage with a spray gun. Gelcoat sprayed on one of the boxes:
And my fingers were too sticky to take pictures during layup, so here are the boxes popped from the molds:
The boxes were the biggest and most complex layups I've attempted so far. While I seem to have the alligatoring under control, I had a couple small issues with my layup. The boxes are both good structurally, but there are some spots I'll have to patch and fair because of bubbles between the gelcoat and the mat. It would have been nice if they'd popped out perfect, but the patching won't be too bad.
Quit a while back, I posted pics of a two compartment box that will go under the deck at the helm.
Last week, I finally got around to fabricating the deck that will go on top of it.
And a trial fit in place:
And finally, a trial fit of the outer boxes for the fish box and live well:
That brings the progress report up to date.
Dave