Where'd everybody go??

The other i550 builder's blogs have been awfully quite lately. I know that Kevin in Chicago has been hampered by the cold in his garage, but that hasn't kept him from making great strides in identifying a carbon fiber rig for these boats. Sounds like a great solution. He has posted a great deal of information on the rig solution in the i550.org forum.

At the "Dalsin Boatworks" facility progress has resumed after a blissful holiday vacation. Work continues on the (expletive deleted) keel. Sorry, I grew up in Chicago---must be a little Blago coming through. Anyway, after a couple of iterations of filling and fairing over the carbon fiber reinforcement, two layers of glass were laminated to the keel. I tried the suggestion of wetting out the glass on a mylar film and then carefully slapping the whole assembly onto the keel in hopes of getting a nice smooth surface. It turns out that this is not as simple as one might hope. I found that the mylar film created a barrier which made it tremendously difficult to remove any bubbles under the film (of which there were many!). After substantial spitting and swearing, I carefully peeled off the mylar film and smoothed out the bubbles by hand. After it cured the results were not too bad. There will be more filling and fairing, of course, but the results should be nice. I imagine that I will end up rolling a coat or two of epoxy over the final faired foil.

Stay tuned...