The Poet Creek Express - Foamie Hybrid

[KCStudly]

Rolling on. Tonight I got setup and started cutting FG cloth from the big roll. I want to have the front parts of the side walls, and the smaller pieces for the door areas and front wall ready to go so that when I get into a layup I can keep going as far as I can. I may only be able to do one section, like on a week night, but if I get on a roll I’d rather keep going than have to stop, rearrange the bench, and cut more cloth.

To start, the plastic sheet covering the bench had gotten quite a few nicks in it and was pretty dirty. The nicks in the plastic take on sharp edges that tend to snag the cloth. Up until now I had just slapped a piece of packing tape on any egregious burrs, but that was just a stopgap since the edges of the tape can still snag. So I stripped the old plastic off and applied a fresh new piece.


With that out of the way it was time to start cutting some cloth. Now from what I learned reading the Burt Rutan EZ stuff it is important to keep your cloth strands straight, at least if you are trying to maximize strength. The glass fibers work in tension and if you let your weave go all zig-zag the strands have to be pulled straight before they start working; so the straighter the strands the stiffer the panels.

If you haven’t ever worked with glass cloth, it’s not like cotton duck. The fibers are slick and they slide all over themselves. They’re easy to pull out, skew, spread, snag and run, and/or bunch up on each other. So when I roll out some to cut I like to square the weave up to the front and side of the bench, then cut across a single strand, give or take a strand. It takes a little more time to finesse the cloth into shape, but it supposedly (and logically) makes a difference.

Anyway, here I have rolled the cloth out and squared it up to the table. I stuck a couple of spring clamps on the back of the bench to act like wheel chocks and make sure the roll didn’t accidentally roll off.


After cutting a couple of pieces that way I realized that I was spending a lot of time getting the weave straight going back and forth lifting each end of the roll to take its own weight off and let different areas of the sheet slacken so that I could brush it out gently with the palm of my hand. If I tried to pull from the corners it would skew and sometimes run under my fingers (compacting strands together); so I decided to set the roll up on an “axle” so that I didn’t have to handle it so much.

I used a long narrow drop (that I had ripped off of the Red Grandis I used for the hatch ribs) as the axle. To keep the edge of the cloth even with the edge of the bench I rigged up this shaky cantilevered strut to reach out away from the bench on one side…


… and used that marking gauge I made the other day as a prop on the other end. After this pic I added another clamp over the top of the axle to keep it from moving around.


After tweaking things a bit to get the heights at both ends even and the roll parallel to the back of the bench, it took a lot less effort to square up the weave.


Due to the limited bench space, after cutting each of the side wall front section plies I rolled them onto a smaller cardboard tube for safe keeping. To keep things neater when it came time to unroll these cut pieces and use them, when I had the next piece cut I would unroll the smaller tube over the top and then roll the whole stack at once. It was a little tedious and it made sense to pay attention to the order of the cuts (to avoid having to shuffle their order and handle them more), but I seemed to start getting a rhythm. Well, I only got four pieces cut, but I can see things moving along better now that I have a setup to deal with the big roll easier. Rather than break that setup down and wrap the roll back up (to keep it clean and free of shop dust), I just used the packing paper it came in as a drop cloth and covered it up on the bench.


We’re moving on.

[KCStudly]

Today at lunch I was able to walk down to the corner in short sleeves with no jacket. By quitting time it was only 40 deg F. By the time I got to Mecca it was high 30's. When I left a little after 7pm it was close to freezing. The forecast for tonight is even lower into the high 'teens.

Suffice to say I did not attempt any layups. I did, however, get all of the smaller FG pieces cut, including the lower front wall sides, and the door header and sill, for both street and curb sides. So I'm all ready to start in as soon as the weather changes back again.

For these smaller pieces, once I had the cloth pulled out and squared to the table I was able to measure out and mark a few pieces at a time using a straight edge and sharpie. That made the cuts go much quicker, since I didn't have to take the time to straighten the cloth for each piece individually.

I rolled each set of pieces up neatly; put the ones I could fit into plastic bags; and covered it all over again with the packing paper for the night.

I'll wait to cut the roof and hatch cloth until after all of this has been laid up, then I'll see if any adjustments need to be made. For the bigger pieces on the roof I may end up just rolling it out directly onto the cabin, as I think it will be easier to manage it that way.

[GPW]

Here’s to warmer weather !!!

[KCStudly]

As mentioned, on Wednesday I cut a bunch of the smaller pieces of cloth for the door sills, headers and the front lower wall areas next to the locker bump out.

You might just be able to make out the sharpie lines. I used the cut off edge of a 2x piece of lumber as a straight edge with the radius edges down. I figured that would keep any potential snags to a minimum. With the pen it made more sense to drag the tip several times lightly, rather than risk jagging the weave. (I had already made a cut up the middle here before remembering to take a picture.)


I made sure to label each piece legibly, in this case DS2 for one of the 2nd, or top, door sill plies.


I optimized the cuts as best I could on the fly by including the smaller plies for the front lower wall (FL1’s and FL2’s) with the longer door surround pieces.


We had wet air riding the Gulf Stream meet cold air riding the Jet Stream with snow all day Thursday, but being just on the edge of it had no accumulation; though it was cold again.

Friday I attempted to turn some threads in a piece of 1/4 inch SS rod for the axe (or shovel?) holder and it went badly. I’ll have to try again another time.

Yesterday may have been warm enough, but Yvette and I played hooky and took a ride over to Stonington Borough for lunch and a nano brewery tasting that we missed out on during our last vacation.

Today, Sunday, the weather was good, so I reached a mini milestone; I started glassing the cabin. I made sharpie lines across the bottom flaps to help me line the plies up with the bottom edge of the floor, leaving 3 inches to wrap under. Then I positioned the first ply with blue tape so that the door side edge overlapped the door opening by about 1/4 inch, just enough to trim after the cure.


Wrapping onto the roof I trimmed the excess corner partially back to my reference line. It looked like I wouldn’t need any darts to get the cloth to lie down after all. Once I had wetted the top and some of the face of the wall, things were stable enough that I could cut the rest of the excess off. I decided to wet the first ply before draping the second ply over.


By folding the cloth back on itself until the “crease” landed over the clearance and marker light wire locations, I could accurately snip slits for the wires to pass through. This is the upper clearance light wire…


… and the lower marker light.


I had a small triangle of bias cloth ready to cap the bottom front corner of the floor, just in case the darts left voids. However, by making 2 darts in the first ply and only one in the second ply, it was not needed. Here is the dry prep on the first ply. The second ply was cut on the fly, which may have worked slightly better.


I didn’t bother doing a very accurate calculation of how much epoxy it should take, and at first I thought it had added up to a bunch; but in the end after considering what it would have taken to wet out the foam and wood separately, and what spilled on the floor (actually, the cardboard “drop cloth” I had laid down), what I ended up using seemed in reason, and the cloth wasn’t floating in it, so it felt pretty good.

Before trimming the cloth called for about 12 oz of resin. I didn’t keep strict account, but I know I mixed at least 2 at 3.75 (or 5 pumps), 1 x 3.00 (4 pumps), a 2 pumper and a one pump. Perhaps more. By the time you add in the hardener that’s about 16 oz’s. Probably at least one hit the floor, and another lost to a mixing cup as I got distracted fussing with the layup and it started to gel a little, so not too bad.

Here it is after it was all said and done. Grotto Jeff and Karl came up for a visit and Jeff commented how it was neat that the cloth almost disappears (or at least becomes transparent) when properly wetted.


I started the layup with the cabin keeled up slightly to the first stage (2x plus 4x stacked under the cradle) so that I could still reach the top easily, then once I had worked down the side far enough I raised it up to the full keeled position (milk crate under cradle). This made it so that some of the slopping landed back on the wall, and had gravity working for me a little bit more than if I hadn’t.

The second ply overlapped the first ply and the jamb by 1-1/2 inches. To guard against the weight of that extra overlap lifting or pulling up at the flox corner I trimmed it a bit closer to the edge on the fly. You can also see that I was extra careful to wet thru to the flox corner fully.



Sorry for the blurry pic, but you can still make out the wrap under the floor.


At the front the first black line to the right is the mark that helped me round the wall/roof edge over; the second is where the 2nd roof ply will end; the 3rd is where the first side wall ply ends and the first roof ply will end; the 4th is where the second wall ply ends, and the inner most line is the one that was a mistake (disregard).


A little further up on the roof. I painted outside the lines. It worked best to drag the squeegee off the edge of the cloth, rather than the other way that would peel it or bunch it up. So some epoxy got on the bare foam. I brushed and squeegeed this down as best I could to avoid any drips or bumps that would need sanding later.


So that was about 4 or so hours of straight work and I was ready to doff the respirator and be done. I was glad that I had cut the other pieces of cloth, but I was equally glad that I had broken the job up into smaller zones, allowing me to bite things off in smaller sessions.

[Ned B]

Huzzah!! I've been waiting for this post, and I'm sure that I'll only be the first to say: Congratulations on this important milestone !! Now, get back over and repeat the process eleventy seven times so you can go camping!!! J/k of course. Way to go!!!

[GPW]

KC, have you tried one of those "Pizza cutter" ... roll fabric cutters on a “cutting mat” (from the sewing section ) ???

[KCStudly]

Ned, Thanks for the very enthusiastic encouragement. I appreciate that. Can you imagine my trepidation when waking up to a heavy frost this morning? Everything should be okay. It was still only about 4:30pm when I finished up yesterday and it was tacking up fine at that point. Plus Karl had the wood stove going downstairs despite the mild daytime temperatures, so it should all be good, but until I get a chance to check the cure there is still a question in one’s mind.

GPW, I haven’t used that style of cutter. My mom uses one all the time for regular fabrics, quilting and such. I don’t have any trouble making reasonably nice cuts with the scissors, although I am probably much slower. I wouldn’t know how to sharpen one of those wheel cutters and the extra hassle of keeping the required cutting mat underneath seems like a hassle on a project of this scope. I can imagine nicks in the cutting mat snagging on the FG cloth, too. Scissors just seem better suited and more versatile to me. If I was more into a production mode, making multiples, then the time factor might be more relevant, but I would still prioritize a larger cutting table. Interesting to note that my supplier, that has a huge cutting table and multiple marine fabrics for sale, uses regular scissors.

No matter how clean you cut, it seems that there will always be flyaway strands and frayed edges due to handling and as part of the wet out process. I’ve gotten used to not expecting perfectly straight and true edge lines on layup, although I seem to be getting better at matching my layout lines.

I forgot to mention that I did have to fight some ripples in the second ply where it didn’t lay flat at first due to tack from the wet first ply. I was able to smooth it out pretty well before it soaked up too much wet from the first ply, but as I was wetting it out quite a few of the ripples showed back up. I think in the end I was able to walk all of those off the bottom edge of the floor before wrapping it under, but it took some attention to do so.

Each method has its own pluses and minuses. Working alone, wet on wet is tricky with larger pieces, even with the poor man’s pre-preg (PMPP) technique. Two plies dry-on-dry seems to take a lot longer to fully saturate and there is some risk of poor adhesion to the base; and epoxy wicking away from the cloth when it soaks into the base. The two stage dry-on-dry/dry-on-wet method that I used here seemed to be fairly manageable. I like the fact that I could easily tell that I was getting good saturation between the base and first ply; and any excess wet that was applied to insure good wet out of the base was quickly sucked up into the second ply. Yet it was relatively easy to get the second ply positioned w/o it turning into a wad like what almost happened on the tongue box when attempting a largish wet on wet layup.

I did use the slotted roller in a couple of places on the first ply, and once the dry second ply was more or less in place, but I don’t know that it did much for me that the credit card and chopped down chip brush didn’t already do; just one more thing to clean.

I had the small Bondo spreader ready to go in case I decided I needed something a little larger than the credit card squeegee, but I never found the need to switch over. I managed to get thru the whole job using just one chip brush by cleaning it out with acetone occasionally, but I probably should have had another one ready to go in rotation, just to make sure that the acetone had plenty of time to evaporate off before resuming.

All in all it seemed to go well and I am looking forward to getting back to it.

[capnTelescope]

+1 what Ned said!

[Ned B]

KC my mother is a Quilter, and from what I recall the Fiskar line of wheeled cutters use disposable blades. They're wear items, when they dull, you just swap blades. The matts are self healing, and you generally get years of use before you have to replace them.
I bet you'd adjust quickly. You could stack cut the pieces with a little care.

[GPW]

And do be Careful, they are quite sharp .... ask me how I know ... We even got a Spectra safety glove for the left (non-cutting ) hand ...

[KCStudly]

The crocus is starting to spring up. We are looking at near record high temperatures for tomorrow, so another good day to do layups.

Last night I trimmed the overhanging FG from street side front door jamb, and scraped a few drips that had slobbered onto the face of the jamb and sill. I’m very pleased with how the flox corner turned out. I’ll probably soften the edge a little bit more once I get the doors fit.


After a quick sand of the fringe around the entire perimeter and scrubbing amine I went around the perimeter again where the adjacent layups will overlap and scuffed those areas to break the glaze.

I did have a few small ripples here and there on the flat and near the vertical front radius edge, but luckily they were more like blobs of excess epoxy rather than dry cloth or voids. A light sanding knocked those most of the way down w/o breaking through the weave at all.

I carefully cut around the clearance and marker light recesses, so as not to nick the wires. I did get some epoxy on the roots of the wires ahead of the masking tape, but it peeled off of the plastic insulation fairly easily with a little care. A little wad of sandpaper run around the edges of the recesses softened them a bit. Next time I have some neat epoxy going I will paint inside of the recesses to seal the wood (the lower one has already had several coats of “The Mix”).



There were a few bristly fibers at the root of the dart under the front corner, so I sanded those a bit. Not perfect, but sealed well and no reason to fuss with it any further.


I had a very few small scattered blister like eruptions, about the size of pin heads, which I attributed to the acetone from cleaning the chip brush. Next time I will definitely have two brushes going, or maybe even just trash 'em after a couple of mixing cups worth of epoxy. As the weather warms up I will also have to pay more attention to my pot times and switch to the slow hardener as appropriate. Mind you not mixing during the course of a layup, but rather selecting the correct hardener at the beginning of any particular layup.

I’m happy with the scissors and will leave the wheel cutter for future consideration. Thanks for the information.

[Gunguy05]

KC, I haven't commented in a while, but have been following from afar..your attention to detail, and documentation of said detail, makes my head spin! Great work and keep on keeping on. You are gonna have a masterpiece when it's finished, no doubt in that.

I echo what GPW said about the book. I would buy one in a heartbeat! I frequent lots of online forums for my various hobbies and interests, and your thread is by far the most complete of anything I've read, anywhere. Great work!

[KCStudly]

Brian, Well that is very high praise, indeed. Thank you kind sir. As they say down under, I'm quite "chuffed" by your generous compliments.

[ScottE]

Great job with your FG finishing and attention to detail! This project is very impressive!

[KCStudly]

Thank you for the nice comment.