July 18, 2019
I took a bit of time in the early evening to prep the backing plates for further work. Since the new seacocks arrived, I have been itching to get started on their installation - that may be coming this weekend. For tonight, I needed to glue up a couple different sizes of G-10 board in an effort to fabricate the backing pads. I had on hand a 1/4" thick board, and had purchased for this project a 1/2" thick board. I decided against sealing a bit of 3/4" meranti with epoxy, and instead decided to glue these two separate boards together to form a much more rugged 3/4" backing pad.
On each of the boards, I used an analog for the base of the seacock to create a diameter a bit wider than the seacock base itself.
Using the table saw and a much used cutting blade, I VERY carefully trimmed the rough pads to remove most of the material outside of the diameter marks.
Using the 14" drill press and a small 50-grit cylinder sanding pad, I worked my way around the 4 separate pads and carefully removed material down to the diameter mark. You can see that I had a shop hose clamped into place to take the fiberglass coming off of the sanding cylinder.
I set the pairs of backing pads on the table saw, and moved on to fine tuning their shapes. I grabbed the 5" ROB sander and a couple 80-grit pads to ease the top of the 1/4" pads and the bottoms of the 1/2" pads. I wanted to ease the horizontal to vertical transitions, with the 1/4" pad being on top and the 1/2" pad on the bottom and touching the hull of the boat. I also sanded the flat surfaces to prepare a good mechanical bonding surface.
With the sanding completed, I set one of the seacocks on a backing pad to get a sense of the final product.
Next step was to glue up the 1/4" and 1/2" pad pairs. I thoroughly wiped down the pads with solvent to remove any remaining sanding debris, and set them on a sheet of plastic to protect the table from eventual epoxy. I then wet out the top of the 1/2" pad and the bottom of the 1/4" pad, and thickened the remaining resin with 406 colloidal silica.
I spread the colloidal silica onto the surfaces and firmly pressed them together, working them back and forth and then aligning scribe marks on each of the pairs. With the balance of the thickened epoxy, I spread it into any surface imperfections around the circumference of the backing pads. In the coming days, I will sand and refine any wayward cured resin.
With the few minutes I had left, I cut-off the extended portion of fiberglass on the Torqueedo Cruise pod drive mounting block. This "block" will be glassed into the overhang just aft of the rudder, and will serve to accept the pod drive for a secure mounting.
Total Time Today: 1.75 hrs
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