Using the longboard is something special. You bond with your boat. It’s like… Zen and the art of sanding…. Ok.. Uhm… Yeah.. it’s not fun.. 🙂 It’s a lot of work, but the nice thing is when you step back after an hour or so and can REALLY see the difference. I guess I’ll rewind a little bit. Last week we did a little work, but between being a little tired from allergies lately, switching jobs and the motorcycle racing season starting, I’ve been rather busy.

The switch was thrown this morning and everything is now running off the new host. I’m pretty sure I caught the only problems I had (thumbnails for the gallery did not function right until I rebuilt them). If anyone notices broken pictures or links, please let me know via the contact page and I’ll try and fix it ASAP. Thanks!

At some point in the next week or so, there might be a temporary interruption in my web site. I need to move servers since my friend who’s been hosting me for the past few years is taking his server down. Since my domain name is up for renewal soon, I just decided to move everything at once. What this means – at some point, there is a chance that digitalvagabond.

Added a tips and tricks section to the site. I’ll try and add anything here that I think others might find useful.

Took more of the larger offcuts and started laying them out for the port float deck These were bogged together, sanded and then an outline of the float and areas that required HD foam marked out and put in place. Dad is off to the side making some more tapping blocks for the front pad eye by laminating together scrap fiberglass cloth. The HD foam then bogged into place The remainder of the time today was spent sanding the top surface of the starboard float deck and rough-trimming the deck into place.

Spent the first part of the morning fixing the area in the keel taping that had WAY too many bubbles from trying to tape while still on its side. Once everything was ground out, I smoothed everything over with cab-o-sil where needed and taped using 6″ tape instead of the size called for This set up pretty quick because of the weather, so the float was taken outside and placed in a position to start working on the keel.

Spent the weekend cleaning up the inside of the floats and making the first float deck (wanted to do both at the same time, but just didn’t have the space and such to do it cleanly. Once again, the floats get moved into the driveway for working after making some cradles to support them upright at the beam bulkheads Nothing else exciting for pictures here as I was quite covered in fiberglass “snow” falling from the sky after attacking things with the angle grinder for a while to clean up edges, openings and get the flange roughed up for gluing the deck in the near future.

After setting up some 1/4″ plywood wrapped in packing tape for the flat molds, we needed to make the angled flanges for the beam bulkheads. First came the basic (flat) portions of the flange Then the mold-plate was placed at the proper angle using a hot-glue gun and all the layers of fabric were put in place (a few at a time), and smoothed gradually worked and smoothed out until they looked good

Sorry for the delay everyone – had to take care of some personal things the past few weeks, but now that it’s all taken care of I’ll be posting my updates (and replying to a number of emails) in the next few days. Don’t quite have the floats ready for exterior lamination, but the starboard float is real close and will most likely be the first float that’s closed up.

Am suffering from a bit of insomnia tonight, so I thought I’d put up a quick post. Wanted to get the bulkhead flanges done over the weekend, but found myself sick from friday afternoon until sunday afternoon. Feeling ill while wearing a respirator with your head in the confines of a float hull was not appealing, so it will wait until this coming weekend most likely. On the bright side, some of the float hardware showed up this past week.