The Poet Creek Express - Foamie Hybrid

[KCStudly]

I’m not sure if the epoxy in the flox soaked down into the wood, or if squeegeeing level to the foam and lip of the glass dragged filler fibers out of the trough, but there were low areas that needed to be “capped”, or topped up with a “putty” coat. As mentioned, that is where the 5 min epoxy mixed with a bit of the 403 filler came in. The before pics didn’t really show much, but here are the after pics showing the flox corner nice and flush.




Yesterday was a day away from the build. Today, Sunday, I had Karl help me flip the hatch around so that it is now standing on the street side edge with the curb side up in the air.

While doing the street side it didn’t take much to overwhelm the rotary cutter in the Dremel. Working in about 6 inch long segments I could skim the surface on the first cut, and make a couple more passes; but once the cutter got a little deeper friction would heat things up and it would start to smoke. Other than worrying about starting a fire and burning Karl’s barn down… and losing TPCE in the process… it made things go slower, having to cool the burr down every few seconds. I resorted to dunking it in a pot of water.

So today, before starting in on the curb side, I drilled a size for size hole in the side of a scrap piece of maple just below the face. I used this for a jig to hold the cutter steady while I scraped the wood resin off of each cutting and kerf surface. Then I used that ultra-fine file (that I bought at the tractor swap) to dress the teeth a little and bring the cutter back. It seemed to work well enough to get thru the second side without having to buy another cutter.



I’ll describe the process of cutting out the flox gouge again; this time with better pictures. The epoxy (with glass cloth) under the hatch sealing lip soaked into the first wood ply of the inner hatch skin, so I started by gouging straight down into the second wood ply. As usual, I learned as I went and found that it was better to keep the cutter travel speed up, making more shallower cuts, than it was to plow deeply or to plunge in individual bites. Again, this worked best working in short 6 to 8 inch lengths. Each time I stepped off the step stool to cool down the cutter I would move the stool by about the same 6 to 8 inches, maintaining my hand angles and lighting.



Next came the angle cut taking all but a sliver of the fifth ply at the top (outside edge) angling back down to the bottom of the first cut. This took several passes over each 6 to 8 inch section shaving a little at a time.



This next picture is a little blurry, but it shows the two stacked abrasive discs used to sand the first wood ply off of the lip of glass. Again, the learning curve found that it worked best to use this angle and clean off the bottom of the groove first, working along the groove from side to side. Then move up a scooch and make another pass along, repeating until getting to the top, but not trying to get every last bit of wood. This worked a lot better than trying to plunge up and down, I had very few blowouts, and the top of the glass lip didn't get too thin except in a very few small spots.


With the light behind the hatch it was easy to see thru the glass and tell when all (most) of the wood had been removed.


Once the whole side was at this stage I used a little scrap of 100 grit working both the charred wood side and the glass lip to clean things up.


Then if there were any small spots of wood left on the glass it was simple to scrape them off with the edge of the utility blade, which coincidentally fit down into the wedge shaped cut perfectly.


No more wood.


Although I had been using the foxtail brush to sweep sawdust as I went, next I blew out any remaining sanding dust before moving on to the filler.


At the spar end I only used the rotary cutter and the utility knife, and got a better result there, too.



From doing the other side I knew that 2 pumps of resin (1.5oz) would be too much, but that I had used more than half of it; so I took a stab at it and weighed out 1oz plus 0.20oz of hardener. Added one full spoonful of the 403 filler and that was exactly how much flox was needed to do the job, not one speck more and not one speck less; once I did the initial fill and went back to make sure the bulk of it was all topped up, I was scraping the cup and any spillover from the surrounding areas to have enough to fill those last little bits on the vertical edge of the spar.


The packing tape used last time worked okay, and released easily, but wasn’t very precise. This time I wrapped a scrap of wood with packing tape and clamped it on as a dam to keep the vertical edge from slumping.



I tried to do a better job filling the whole groove and making sure that I didn’t sweep away low spots while squeegeeing, but I am betting that things will settle and absorb like they did last time, so I expect to have to cap things off with some 5min again this time.

Once that is done and sanded fair, we’ll set the hatch up on the bench again and I will glass the hinge area and the license plate recess, the latter using bias cut cloth. It will be interesting to see how the license plate area goes with the marker light wires sticking thru.

Thanks for watching.

[Wolffarmer]

Tony. Thanks for the Ballad of Pouge and Elms. Never knew they also got a song.

Don't get me wrong. I am no supporter of Dallas. It also seems that during the trial Pouge was made out to be some hard ass game warden. I do not know, never did meet him or any other game warden. At least that is in my memory. Heck it only happened 30 years ago.

[tony.latham]

Tony. Thanks for the Ballad of Pouge and Elms. Never knew they also got a song.

Don't get me wrong. I am no supporter of Dallas. It also seems that during the trial Pouge was made out to be some hard ass game warden. I do not know, never did meet him or any other game warden. At least that is in my memory. Heck it only happened 30 years ago.

I know Bill's daughters. 'Nuff said.

Stay warm tonight. Lookin' like a two-log night.

Tony

[Wolffarmer]

I got my Coleman lantern going to keep me warm.

[OP827]

Good craftsmanship KC and moving forward!

[KCStudly]

Thank you OP. I see you are making big progress over on your build as well. All of that pink foam covered with 6oz reminded me of my TB, just to a lesser degree.

[tony.latham]

KC:

I woulda said, "no way," on the free-hand Dremel tool. Again, I'm impressed.

T

[KCStudly]

Thanks Tony. I suppose using a die grinder (or Dremel) is an acquired skill. I don't use the Dremel much, but have spent some time "behind the wheel" of a die grinder. That's what drives a person to become a better welder; the better your welds, the less time you have to spend with the die grinder!

Long story short, I got my 10 year service award at work today with a nice little bonus check. Just about covers what I spent on the bulk of the glass cloth and the first gallon of epoxy/hardener.

[Atomic77]

Congratulations KC!

[KCStudly]

Thanks!

[OP827]

Congratulations on the award KC!

[KCStudly]

Thanks!

Last night I stayed late to swap out a noisy pump, so no progress on the build. And tomorrow I have been invited to join the upper management in their X-mas happy hour gathering. Kind of odd, last minute, and while I do perform white collar work on the design side, with working leader responsibilities in my bosses absence, and certain project coordination duties, most of my day-to-day duties seem to be mired down firmly in blue collar tasks, so I'm not sure what to think about it.

Not to mention that I had a flat tire when I left work tonight; had run over something the other night that sounded a bit too loud to have been an acorn. I used the portable air tank from the tool crib to fill it, and will probably have to fill it again in the morning before heading off. Had no time to get it fixed tonight, so will have to deal with it tomorrow during the day.

Either way, I will likely not get out to Mecca tomorrow, either.

[cpinetree]

Interesting clamp "invention" found on youtube.
I know you can never have enough clamps or enough of the right kind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLtWd0N8QbQ

[KCStudly]

That's pretty cool, Pinetree. You might want to share that on the tips and techniques forum here.

[KCStudly]

Okay, I have been lurking around a bit without much worthy to report, but am still making progress on tedious details. Unfortunately these things don’t photograph too well, so it is hard to convey what is going on. Basically it is all glass prep work so that I can get the hatch back in place and get into the big layups. I have found that, just like a good paint job, good glass work is all about the prep work. If you don’t have proper prep you have no chance of a perfect layup (…and even if you do there are no guarantees!).

That being said, I find myself working along and not taking as many pics, so when it comes to telling the story things seem a little patchy, which ironically matches the look of the work. To be honest with you I kind of lost track of where in the sequence these first four pics were taken. I think this was Thursday after popping the little temporary dam piece off, but before cleanup and sanding. Either that or it is after cleanup, sanding, prep and capping with filled 5min epoxy to fill suck out voids.



Here is that area on the curb side hatch bumper where I had sanded away a couple fingernail sized areas that didn’t have good adhesion. You can sort of see the sharpie outlines that help me remember where I needed to do the makeup work. Again, this is kind of ugly looking, but most of it will get sanded back.


Last pic from Thursday, I stuffed shrink wrap into the license plate bolt holes and trimmed it flush.


Friday evening I forgot my epoxy tote bag (used to haul glues and stuff to keep it at room temperature) in my office at work, and it was raining. So when I got to the car and realized I didn’t have it with me I figured I would be okay, since I had sanding to do.

Here’s the curb side hinge spar end faired back.



And the curb side bumper end after sanding back. (Still needs a little pickup.)


The side of the corner came out pretty nicely, but I may have over sanded the lip in a couple of places trying to get rid of some high spots without taking any of the foam.


Nice having Karl around to help me reposition the hatch up onto the bench.


This will allow me to glass the area under the hinge and the license plate recess, and to fair along the step were the bumper glass plies wrap up onto the bumper.


Forgot to take a picture on Friday, but remembered here after finishing the other end; I scraped and sanded the overspray and spackle stains off of the top of the hinge spars on both the hatch and cabin side.



I wasn’t sure if I wanted to fill up the temporary hatch locating screw holes with epoxy filler yet, so I filled them with wadded up stretch wrap and trimmed flush. This will allow me to glass over them and drill them out later if need be. Otherwise I can just drill them out and fill them properly once I am sure I no longer need them. Also note the little jagged edge on the spar end that needs a little more filler.


After having sanded the spar tops the hinge screw holes had sanding dust in them. I figure it will be easier to see these to drill thru the glass later if they are clear, so I went along with the point of my circle compass poking out each hole. When I got to one of the middle ones I was reminded that I had broken a hinge screw off in one. Hard to see in this pic, but bear with me; there is a series of before, during and after pics of the repair process to follow.


At first I thought I would try to drill the screw out. I didn’t think it would work, but you have to start somewhere. The stop block would ensure that I didn’t do anything stupid like drill thru the spar to the good side.


Of course the drill jumped off the end of the screw, rather than drilling it out, but the stop acted as a nice steady bearing that I could hold onto to direct the drill bit like a rotary file. That enabled me to walk around the outside of the screw opening up the hole a little bigger.


This gave me the idea of using a core boring roto-broach bit to make a cleaner hole around the screw, but the starter hole needed to be opened up a bit more since I would have to remove the pilot bit out of the broach so that it could pilot off of the broken screw instead. I picked the cylindrical burr tool for the Dremel.


That didn’t work well at all because the kerfs on the end of the tool kept catching the screw and sending the burr off to the sides violently. But it worked enough to start the broach.


Although a little off center, that worked well enough with the screw keeping the broach from wandering off.


The gap around the screw wasn’t quite big enough to get the needle nosed vice grips down around the screw so I switched to a more slender rotary file that could slip between the edges of the hole and the screw. That made it easy to walk around the screw and hog the hole out enough.




Although a little harder to get the screw out, what is nice about the broach being shorter than the screw is that there will still be about half of the new screw buried in the oak.

The cutting operations burned and burnished the walls of the hole, so to prep for epoxy filler I rolled up a piece of the big heavy 36 grit sander belt (with thick stiff fabric backing) and chucked it straight into the drill, then ran it in and around the lip of the hole.



I accidentally deleted the pic of the screw by itself in the hole, but jumping ahead a little you can see what I did here. I waxed a new screw and installed it in the remaining part of the old hole with the head sticking up high. Then I piped filled epoxy around the screw and tamped it down good to be sure there were no air voids. Then I added a little more filler to make sure that there was plenty to sand back flush.


Sometimes it can be a little sloppy getting the filled epoxy into the zip lock bag to do the piping, so I decided to try putting the bag into a paper cup and folding the bag open around it. Precut the tip to avoid having to clean the scissors. It worked okay, but I’m not sure it was any more graceful.


Once in the bag I wiped off the stir stick and used it as a squeegee on the outside of the bag to push the filler into the corner of the bag.


Then I sealed the bag and twisted the excess up as you would a pastry bag. In this posed photo after the fact you can see how I ran a bead (now squeegeed out fair) along the edge of the two plies of 6oz cloth that wrapped up around the bottom of the hatch bumper. The cloth covers the bumper and about a third of the hatch frame sill (3/4 inch board above the brown glue line). Above that you can see the fuzzy white filler that has already been spread. (I should have squeezed out a little extra filler to show the effect, but I had taken one glove off already to handle the camera and didn’t want to make a mess.)


Here’s another look at it along the length of the bumper.


I had used a one pump squirt of the West System epoxy and the 403 filler for this, which was enough for the screw hole repair; the bumper glass fairing; one of the hatch rib screw head holes that I accidentally gouged the spackle/foam filler out of; the pickup work around the ends of the hinge spar and bumper; and a few other minor dents and dings here and there.

I didn’t get the hinge area laid up, but progress is progress.