trickdhat

sealing the deck penetrations meant removing some old hardware...unfortunately it was bedded in 5200. Northing worked until I found this stuff:


The first layup. Note the shifted peel ply and breather:



Catch Pot with vacuum gauge. The bag kept this vacuum over night with the pump off:



All the vacuum bag installed core up:

...

The first step with replacing the core was identifying justhow much core was rotten. As you canexpect, the affected area was greater than I initially expected.
The void along the edge and between the topskin and balsa created by not spreading the bonding resin allowed any wateringress to propagate through the laminate from the mast to the rear bulkhead ofthe cabin top.This resulted in asection apx. 18” by 8’ along the edge of the cabin top needing to be replaced.For the most part, removing ...

Tags: balsa, core, epoxy, from below, vacuum

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The past few months I've noticed I've become of consumer of this page instead of a contributor. Although I check the page often and am actively working on Luffalee, I haven't posted much lately. One of the best things about this community is its made up of real people with a shared interest, not professional shipwrights writing articles on the absolute best way to compete a task. The result is a resource that's inclusive, a community that celebrates success and helps us laugh off failure. I ...

Tags: balsa, construction, core, rot

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We’re trying to make Luffalee safe, easy and fun to sail,and comfortable in that order, so an obvious choice was to replace the lifelines. The ones that came on the boatwere probably the original ones and they showed it. They were sagging and didn’t have anything leftin the turnbuckles to pick up the slack. The gate on the starboard side wouldn’t open and there were multiple locationswhere rust was visible under the vinyl coating. With the discovery of CS Johnson splice line terminals and the ...

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I’m quickly learning nothing on a boat is as simple as it seems and nothing goes exactly as planned. The most recent lesson came in the form of tensioning the rig after the compression post was rebuilt. All was going well until I attempted to tighten the backstay…

I like taking the hands-on approach when learning, but maybe not so much when it comes to galling. The Navtec turnbuckle threads ...

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