We have a replacement piece!

Another week gone by and we have managed to get ourselves a new piece to fit into our boat! The infusion was quite the experience. It took us many tries to get the vacuum set up properly on the mold. Eventually what worked was, taking everything off and applying three thin layers of resin to it. We think there were tiny pinholes in the mold that prevented the vacuum from fully forming. When we made the mold, the bottom layer of fiberglass did not appear to be fully saturated because there were tiny white bubbles. Kevin had filled them a little with Bondo, and then wax, but we suspect this wasn’t enough. It was amazing how much of a difference it made doing the extra resin layers; we had no problem getting a vacuum after that. In the end, we were delayed by 5 days playing with the vacuum set up, but we were finally ready to infuse our piece!

The day of infusion went so well. It was nerve wracking doing the infusion, worrying that if it didn’t go well, we would be set back another several days cutting up new pieces of fiberglass and foam to try again. However, it did seem to go well. We took several steps to ensure that the resin would travel farther with this infusion. We put in more holes through the foam and they were bigger. Also, we re-orientated the red mesh because the resin flowed better in one direction than the other. We put lots of the gray strips to help distribute the resin, as well. We also used shorter hoses to get the resin in so that less was wasted in the hoses. Finally, we used funnels to add the resin in, so that we were always dumping fresh resin (it has about 20 mins before it starts to gel) on top of the old and ensuring that no resin was gelling before it even got to the piece. We did a time lapse video of the whole procedure and it is at the bottom of this post.

The next day we took all the vacuum stuff off the new piece to see just how successful we were. It was surprising how difficult it was to removed, mostly because all the gray strips that were used to distribute the resin were thick with hardened resin. We discovered on the underside that there were a few dry spots where the resin didn’t get through all the way. Many were near the edges and since we will be grinding down the edges where they meet up with the boat hull, we are not too worried about them. However, there were a bunch of small dry spots in the middle. They do not look very deep. Kevin read that we can re-infuse them by applying a vacuum to this side, but when he tried this it was only mildly effective. Kevin now says, that as an engineer, he has to investigate on whether these dry patches are actually significant enough to affect the integrity of the piece. So, he will be grinding one down to see if it goes any further than the top layer. We are very hopeful that they won’t.

The day before the infusion was Kevin’s birthday. He spent the day with Owen finally getting the vacuum in place. I was not able to help because it seems I developed a significant reaction to the different disposible gloves we were using! After wearing both nitrile and latex gloves for several hours for many days now, I guess my skin has had enough. My hands were very swollen, sore, and itchy on Kevin’s birthday, so I wasn’t able to help. Luckily we have found gloves that I don’t seem to reactto and will be using them from now on. I did manage to hobble together a cake for Kevin to celebrate his birthday. We enjoyed it after we our very late night steak off the barbeque.

Kevin and I have been running from the marina towards the ocean every other morning. We have discovered a boat launch area next to a park with a campground. It is nice to visit, and there is a long pier there that is full of people fishing on the weekends. We took the kids there one evening to enjoy the playground, and watch a rocket launch. We were impressed with how many people were out to see the launch. Even though rocket launches are several times a week, people, including locals, seem to still be eager to see them. We like the ones where the first stage of the rocket actually comes back to Cape Canaveral instead of landing on a barge in the Atlantic. When the first stage comes back to Cape Canaveral, it travels very quickly and looks like it is falling and then suddenly slows down right near the ground and lands perfectly! Then, several minutes later is the sonic boom, which is two very loud bangs that are startling even when expected. Unfortunately, there has only been two of these landing since we have been in Port Canaveral.

Yesterday we all travelled back to Vancouver/Victoria for work and a break from the boat. Our time at the boatyard and working on the repair has necessitated deep discussions about our remaining time on our trip. Unfortuantely, we now have plans to finish the repair before taking the boat back up to the Chesapeake where we will have it hauled out in June and put on the hard for long term storage. We will be officially back from our trip at the start of July. We are home for 3 weeks and I suspect that we won’t have much to report in that time, but I will resume the posts when we are back in Florida to finish up the repair. By my estimation now, we will take another several weeks to get to the point where we can put the boat back in the water and move it up to the Chesapeake. We will likely take a pretty direct route to the haul-out boatyard so, I don’t forsee much more adventuring for us on this trip. . . but knowing us, we will find it where we can!