A long, messy and tiring weekend…

It started out simple enough…   Do more rough-fairing and filling on the starboard side of the main hull…  Untill we made another pass and thought… ya know…  This is good enough to laminate…  And so the tale of this weekend starts… 🙂

First had to carry the new roll of A-spec fabric from the living room where it’s been safely sitting into the garage.  Not too difficult, only 100 lbs.  Then we rolled out a length of fabric, starting at the keel over-lap, and put a few Raptor staples to hold it.  Unrolled another full length after marking the over-lap and placed it on top, lapping over the gunwale.

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So far, so good…  We were making good progress.  Earlier in the afternoon, I decided I wanted to try using paint rollers to apply resin for this portion since gravity would NOT be on our side.  We picked up some 1/4″ nap rollers (smallest we could find) and 2 roller-handles with extensions.  Turns out, this was a fabulous idea, as it was easy to quickly wet-out the top and sides, then squeegy excess resin out and get a good laminate.  What neither of us realized was that while I was working the squeegy and dad was mixing more epoxy, the two rollers we were using kicked quite hot and stuck to the paint trays.  This, in itself, would not be a problem, except they fused to the roller handles and rendered them useless.  Again, this wouldn’t be TOO much of a problem, except we hadn’t done the keel yet…

Try as we might, gravity hated us last night and the keel turned into a right mess.  You can see the (very slippery even when cured) droplets of epoxy on the garage floor showing our fruitless efforts to laminate the keel.  Took around 2.5 hours, including all the work trying to get the keel.  If we bought even one more paint roller handle I think it would have gone off wonderful.  Lesson learned for next side.

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So… we’ll grind part of the keel and do it again…. but you know what would make it REAL easy to laminate the keel?  You guessed it… having the hull upside-down!

What follows is a few hours of sweat, cursing, pain, more cursing, a little more sweat, no passing out and a little more curing…. 😉

We put a nice 1/2″ eye-bolt into the rafter to use with a 4:1 tackle as a belay.  Tied off to the aft beam bulkhead and hoisted the hull up.  Fortunately, there are no pictures of this event and neither of us ended up in hospital 🙂  What I will say with regards to turning over the main hull of an F-22 (and no-doubt other designs) – there are TWO points of stability and the hull is very happy sitting on either of those two points until the cows come home.  It took more effort to get the hull to actually turn over far enough for the belay to actually pick up weight than the whole ordeal….  But we were left with this :

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(shown after cleaning the driveway back up).  Oh, another thing that would help in the future… move the car first.. 🙂

The good news, the port side looks to be in good shape and shouldn’t take too much sanding, we only damaged a small portion of the transom (mostly what gets cut out for the rudder anyway) and the inside now has good working room to get under the settes and the anchor well.

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The hull has gained a few pounds since we last moved it… looking forward to rolling it a few more times once all the laminate is complete….