Friday, February 11, 2005

Laying the groundwork


boat building Feb 5, 2005 002
Originally uploaded by OzzyC.

Realizing in advance that this would be a long process, Greg and I decided that we would design and implement as many labor-saving devices as we could early on. This photo shows a jig we built to save time, labor and materials as we use epoxy and fiberglass tape to join the various seams together.

The tray, located on the left side of the shelf unit, is designed for saturating the fiberglass tape with epoxy before laying the tape onto the plywood joints. Located close to the tray, are two rolls of biaxial fiberglass tape on a metal dowel. A tape-measure is also attached to the shelf, for quickly and accurately measuring strips of the fiberglass tape.

This process allows us to quickly and efficiently measure out strips of fiberglass tape, lay it in the tray, pour epoxy into the tray, and squeegee the epoxy over the fiberglass tape, giving an even coat of epoxy, and making sure there's neither too much nor too little epoxy on the fiberglass tape, which helps ensure a strong joint.

If you click on the picture, you will be taken to a larger version of this picture, complete with comments and notes. (Larger picture, comments and notes courtesy of the features of www.flickr.com -- a great site for posting, commenting on, and blogging photos.)

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