Lots Accomplished!

The past few days I have gotten a fair amount of different tasks accomplished. I stopped by the lumber store and picked up some Mahogany, Poplar and Cedar so that I can start working on the gunwale trim, the wing tips, and the trim pieces for the wings. I had never used Cedar before and I was amazed as to how light it was compared to the board of Mahogany that I bought! I have a good friend of mine at work that does a lot of woodworking and he compared it to being a notch above balsa wood! (A little exaggeration, but not much!). I spent a fair amount of time milling and ripping the wood into the required dimensions and ended up emptying my shop vac a couple of times from all the sawdust generated from the milling operation required to get the wood to the correct thickness. Its great to have the right tools for the job!

Next step was to glue up my wing leading edges blanks. I ended up making a composite of Cedar and Poplar for the main portion. My intention was to use strictly Cedar, but the piece I purchased was not big enough and Home Depot was a lot closer than Woodworkers Source. In order to make the 40mm thickness I ended up gluing a 19mm piece of Cedar to two 11mm pieces of Poplar (Yes thickness planing an 18mm piece of Poplar down to 11mm makes a lot of sawdust.

 I let it set overnight and this AM I used the joiner to clean up the epoxy and true the face of the wood for the second glue up operation. I measured the thickness of the glued up beams and noticed I it was 43mm thick, therefore, I used the joiner one more time to reduce the thickness to 40mm.

Next step was to glue on the Mahogany nose piece and let it set up.

After keeping my wife happy by taking care of some much needed yard work I decided to tape up all the  seams on the deck. In Dudley's instruction he has you taping up the wing and deck seams, doing a bunch of additional work, then coming back and doing the nose and sloping panel seams. I decided that I might as well knock them all out at once. My goal is to let the epoxy set up and then put a couple of coats of epoxy on the deck surface prior to flipping it over and working on finishing the wing.

Layout Out the Fiberglass Tape

Seams Taped and Epoxied

Since the temperature is finally dropping around here I went onto System 3's website and ordered the fast hardener for their laminating epoxy. When I ordered the epoxy from Dudley he had recommended the slow hardener due to the extremely hot weather we have here in the summer time, but after all was said and done I really did not work on the boat in the heat of the summer so I really should have ordered the fast hardener. Live and learn!