Most of my dust gets caught in the big drum & I only have to clean the finest parts out of the vacuum's filter every 3 of 4 days when I am sanding a lot. I could almost use that again as filler its that fine but in reality I dont get enough to be of any use. Each time I clean the filter there isnt enough dust in the rest of the vacuum to cover the bottom of its collector.
I'm still alive, barely. I don't know what I had but I have not felt that bad for a longtime. Gonna give it another day or so and then I promise to get back to building on the Northwind.
Work is finally slowing down some so I have had a little time to get back to work on the NorthWind. I finished sanding the interior to night and layed the fiberglass in the boat.
It was still early so I said what the heck and started epoxying the fiberglass. It feels good to finally have time to get back to boat building.
Trimmed all of excess fiberglass off tonight and applied second coat of epoxy to the interior. No pics looks just like it did yesterday. I am still hoping to start the deck on Sunday if everything works out.
Put the third coat on the interior early this morning. I am going to put the forms back in tonight and maybe lay a strip or two. No boat building tomorrow, Momma wants to hit the Brazos early and try her hand at a big GatorGar.
The third coat of epoxy set up well today in the heat. I reinstalled the forms in preperation for stripping the deck, which I will start tomorrow evening or Monday. Went to Lowes this evening and found some really nice Cedar that has a good color. I am running several different patterns through my head that I think will look nice on the deck. I just have to settle on one and get started.
Got the rest of the forms set inplace and put blue tape on everything I don't want stuck with glue.
Got the first six strips layed down. The first few are always the hardest, they have to be perfect because all the other are layed against them. They went down pretty easy, I had to make a couple of adjustments but nothing major.
With these down I should make a little progress tomorrow evening.
Where the hull transitions to the deck is a pretty tight radius. I tried several different ways to close the gap between the first and second deck strip without succes. I finally decided to run the first strip down the boat while keeping the gap even over the entire length of the boat. I then cut a wedge out of white pine and glued it in place. This is not a design flaw it is just the way Seawind was designed and Matt stayed to true to the orignal design.
Before sanding:
After sanding:
I started stripping the deck and forgot to take ppictures of progress, but I have three more panels so I will get some more pics.
I had time to make some progress this evening. I finished sanding the front deck and started laying out the strips for the rear deck.
While waiting on the glue to dry on the first set of strips on the rear deck I went ahead and put a pre-coat of epoxy on the front deck just to seal it from stains and such until I am ready to fiberglass the entire deck. It is amazing what a difference it makes went wet out with epoxy. You finally really get to see what it is going to look like.
From this:
To this:
In the previous update I mentioned having to make a wedge to close the gap on tyhe first and second deck strips. It worked better than I could have hoped.
