After a trip to Melbourne during the week I only got to the shed on one afternoon during the week so little got done. I didn’t really get much done to show for this weekend despite putting in my usual 8 hours on Saturday and 6 hours on Sunday. What I did get done was to finish the last details of the port side walk in robe cabinets and I finished the clean up of the uni glass in the doorways in the starboard hull.
As I mentioned last week, grinding down glass and resin with a small angle grinder with a sanding disk on is about the messiest job on the build. With most power sanding tools like orbital and random orbital’s you can attach a vacuum hose to extract dust and even without dust extraction the dust falls below the tool as you work, but with a grinder they spin at about 10000 rpm and they throw the dust as velocity into the air. You are guaranteed to get covered in it. So to try to mitigate this I tried wearing a hoodie with the hood on and my full face mask respirator. It worked, it kept the dust off my skin and out of my hair, but it was very hot inside those clothes.
As the furniture in the walk in robe is small I am using duflex offcuts, as I start on the larger furniture in the larger rooms I will start to use polycore. Either way though, the edges must be decored and back filled with filler. On the cabinets there are and will be a lot of 50mm rails or posts (rails horizontal, posts vertical) of varying length but all need to be decored and filled. Filling takes a day to set before it can be sanded and the piece used. It occurred to me that I am making them as I go and I am going to need them constantly so I should make a number of them so I can keep working when I get on a roll rather then continually having to wait for them to be ready. I have decided that it would also be a good idea to have decored rails waiting for filling and whenever I have left over coving filler I can fill another rail or 2.
So yesterday I did all the measuring and calculating before cutting out the panels, shelves, rails etc and back filled the them. I put them outside in the sun to harden faster and I glued and glassed the kickboard across the walk in robe and glued a couple of extra pieces to the floor to act as a base for the bottom shelf for it to bed down level. I can than glass the bottom shelf in. After that I then got stuck into the grinding of the 4 doorways. That took about an hour and a half and I stopped for lunch for half an hour and by then the panels for the furniture had been setting for about 3 hours and had set enough for me to sand the and glue and glass them in.
I glued and glassed the bottom shelf in then the middle shelf and Jo arrived to collect me. I kept her weighting for 10 minutes or so as I finished peel ply for these tapes satisfied that whilst I dawdled around a bit in the morning I still managed to get everything done that I set myself for the day.
Today I cut the rest of the rails and posts and panels for the facade and door facings and the posts that the door or doors can be hinged to. I am still not decided if I will hang to 240mm doors or a single 480mm door. If I hang 2 doors I need posts both sides if not then just on the left hand side. I glued and glassed the draw and bin cabinet in including the spacer rail that I had glued in during the week.
I gave all the tapes a sand (grinder then orbital) to remove any sharp glass splinters. I wont be bogging or fairing the inside of any of the cupboards so tapes will be visible through the white epoxy but all I want is for them to feel smooth so that I or anyone else does not reach into a cupboard and jag their finger on a sharp shard of glass. I then vacuumed al the dust out again and gave them all a coat of white epoxy.
All that is left to do now I glue and glass the facade onto the hull side and glue the post or posts in and a rail in along the top of the cabinet from one side of the hull to the other. This will also complete the platform for the top so it can also be glued in. Whilst painting the inside of the cupboards today I also gave the underside of the top a coat of white resin too. I wont be glassing the top from underneath, I will just glue, cove and glass it to the hull sides and bulkheads from above. Then all that will be left is to hang the doors and fit the drawer and bin and attach the front. The fronts and doors will all (throughout the boat) be dry fitted, then taken off the boat for storage and will be painted with the gloss paint when the outside is painted. They will probably be painted with the same paint but they could be painted a funky color like red. Unlikely but we change our minds so often who knows.
Going on how long it is taking me to do the smallest rooms in the boat I am going to be building furniture for months. But I am just getting the hang of it so I should get faster and also the larger rooms have larger furniture that wont take much longer to make but fill the room fast, so perhaps I will get a move on soon. That said, it is forecast to be 39 degrees tomorrow and that sort of temperature all week so I dont see much being done this week!
