1973 196 rebuild question

[RickK]

You can make the molds out of wood with split wooden dowels (like closet rod) for the gutter?

[Ulysses485]

Duffy, I think FRP might work. Might wanna test it first before a big layup. I would also recommend using a wax. I bought some PARTALL® Paste #2 Mold Release Wax off amazon to make sure it lets loose off the melamine mold I built for my 240 transom and it worked quite well. How thick is the FRP?

[Duffy1470]

Frp is 1/8 inch ish thick. I was going to lay it all on the concrete floor which appears flat. I suspect I am going to go with the melamine unless you(U) or Rick or dbiscayne had personal experience with one of these other mold materials.

[Duffy1470]

Rick, I used wooden fence ... stuff? (Basically 1 inch square).... on another hatch I made that came out okay. The wood worked great with packing tape laid over it as a releasing agent. My mistake was using visqueen instead of melamine. The visqueen just wasn't flat enough. It worked but looked very sub par. I ended up sanding and sanding but it still was not what it could of been.

[Duffy1470]

Casting deck time

Form made of 1/2 x 1 inch pieces of wood. They were 8 ft long and less than $2 a piece. They worked great for this because the boat is curved and so are these pieces of wood like all the wood from home depot and lowes.



Going to tape the 3/4 x 3/4 pieces of pvc board down on melemine where I want the gutters. do they need to bigger than 3/4 like maybe 1 inch. Actually hurting my brain thinking about this as it is upside down .

[RickK]

Nice!

[Duffy1470]

I can't quite get the melamine sheets even. Apparently my concrete floor isn't even.  Haven't laid any glass yet but need to deal with that.

[Duffy1470]

I need some help from everyone.  I have a serious case of analysis paralysis. So I am making this deck with gutters in it on a mold. The top of the deck will come out nice and smooth with gutters glassed in. Next I core the deck with 3/4 inch honeycomb hopefully wet on wet. Once the whole thing sets up I pop it off and the top of the deck is nice and perfect but it is not the part that lays on the stringers and bulkhead. The part that lays on the stringers and bulkhead is the bottom of coring and bottom of the gutters which won't be flat and perfect, thus the paralysis. Should I try to make the gutters align with the stringers? Can't get my head wrapped around it

[RickK]

What are the red lines representing? Gutters? Are you going to have a ledge along the outside to support the deck? I assume you'll only have one hatch?

[Duffy1470]

Red lines are where the potentially uneven bottom of the deck will rest on level/even stringers and bulkhead. I suppose the coring will have to go all the way to the bulkhead and the lip of the center hatch will have to be inside the bulkhead and stringers. I was hoping to make the center hatch align with the stringers, i.e. the gutter is in top of the stringers,  but I can't see it in my head. I looked at mcalgeyver's build but his structure is generally different.

[Duffy1470]

I was not planning on a ledge to mount the deck to like I did for the lower deck because the flare of the bow seemed to be enough but I could be talked into it if you think that is a mistake to exclude .

[Duffy1470]

My goodness I had to stare at this thing for hours before my feeble brain finally saw it. I was one tier away from some kind of spirit quest / talking spirit animal appearance. At any rate, it was a matter of layer order. I couldn't see the end in my head until I walked through the order of layers which are
1. Matte
2. 1708 matte side down
3. Maybe another layer of matte for core bonding purposes
4. Core honeycomb
5. 1708
6. 1708
The part I couldn't envision was where the core and gutter met.. the gutter will end up being matte,1708, matte,1708, 1708





Hard to see all the white on white

[Duffy1470]

Thank you Rick. For whatever reason your post engaged my brain and I finally saw it this afternoon.

[Duffy1470]

The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, well, not quite that dramatic.  First attempt on the casting deck went south on me. I screwed it up, not remembering the bigger laminations never go as planned for me. I am not very good at cutting the patterns into larger sheets of glass so I end up Frankensteining them together. They come out strong as all get out but don't look so great while doing them. They end up looking fine, but not so much during the process.

I aborted in the middle of this one. The gutters, which were 3/4 inch square, were too small. The glass, predictably, did not want to make the small corners. Took it out back and threw it over the proverbial flood wall.


Took the glass from what was supposed to go into first picture and laminated back/bottom of deck panel. Had to make some quick decisions in the middle of the above lam


Enlarged gutters to 2 inch square. Will core this with piece in previous Pic

[Duffy1470]

Where the gutters come out of the casting deck bulkhead will have to be notched, but I'm hoping that will be "easy".  Oh yeah, the above lam was kind of two schedules, one over the gutter and the rest of it.
Over the gutter:
   >Lots of matte of various sizes until it looked substantial
   >layer of 1708 over the whole gutter area cut appropriately to fit

The rest of it:
   >layer of matte
   >layer 1708