I originally heard of Raptor composite staples from Henny’s site where he is using them to hold fabrics in place for infusion. When I first researched their product almost a year ago, I thought it would at least be useful for holding fabric still during large hand layups (I still think this, although now it will be used a lot during the infusion process). What sold me was that they can stay in the laminate because they are composite, and the price isn’t too bad for a specialty item.

Today was filled with a lot of learning. I’ll start with the simple stuff and move into the more complicated. I’m not sure how I feel about Gorilla Glue in certain applications. Right now we’re using it to piece together the chainplates and the bow-web. It seems to work pretty well – in a distructive test it was stronger than the foam – and it sands easily enough. What bothers me about it is the nature of the glue – it foams and expands as it cures.

The resin from Applied Poleramic arrived today. Fortunately, I wasn’t there to move the 200+ pounds worth of goo from where UPS left it on the front porch to the garage. 🙂 Task for this weekend – build the remainder of things for the resin infusion (resin trap and lines), infuse a bulkhead or two and cut out more.

Dexter from Noah’s called to let me know they received some Carbon Fiber from their weaver. It’s not what I was hoping for (10oz uni instead of 13oz uni), but it’ll work fine — just going to double up where needed and make it 20oz total. It’s a tad heavy, but shouldn’t cause too much of a problem since it’s only for the chainplates and bow-web, neither of which I’d mind being heavier/stronger than needed.

Finished cutting out the rest of the float form frames and mounted/braced them. I forgot how dusty MDF gets. When we cut the main hull frames, I’m going to remember a dust mask. Will be ready to start planking floats as soon as we get some batten material, but bulkheads are going to come first — they need to be done anyway, and I need the practice with this vacuum pump so anything that gets screwed up will be as small as possible.

Organized all the CoreCell and Fiberglass between the ceiling hangers and the rack today. Most of the CoreCell fit on one of the hangers above the garage door, the rest is on the rack as it’ll get used pretty quickly.

Well, not really, but almost all the materials have shown up. The shipment from Noah’s showed up at the freight depot today.

I’m just about to consider the new website ready for public use/viewing. I almost have the gallery integrated to the point where I am happy with the display, and I finally worked out the kinks in why the archive section wasn’t displaying properly. Still want to find a way to have the system keep track and tally the time-spent on various portions of the boat instead of manually adding it up.

Started tracing some of the float form frames today. Took a while to figure out the best method for this. We’re doing the recommended height of 22″, and started on the last sheet in the nesting diagram since it had the most float frames to lay out. We’re not following the nesting diagram, however, as we have much more room on the sheet than the illustration. Ended up laying the form frame centerline down the sheet at the rough-center of the width of the strongback, and aligning the form frames with that.

Started and finished the strongback today. Well, ok, we cut a few pieces of lumber last week for it, but everything else was completed today. Starts out rather flimsy and difficult to handle, but by the time we got all the spreader cleats installed it became much more managable. I know once we epoxy the base to the floor it will be completely sturdy. 18 Time spent : 5.5 hours