Yes you are right. I didn't mean to 'condemn' you and if I did I apologize. If it was easy to remove I most likely wouldn't be against it. However as it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to remove it provides diminished returns in my opinion. That being said, yes you are right, it does stabilize the ship. When I had it in the Baden it was very stable but VERY heavy and sunk much easier as it didn't seem to take much damage to sink it. I feel that once the hull was lighter and sat at/near the same waterline.. .it took much more damage to sink it. So its a trade-off... depending on what you are looking for.
That is the general consensus with most veteran battlers I have discussed it with. 'Ballast with Batteries' is the mantra.
Bow shaping.. Gerald did a really good job re-shaping the bow. It needed a bit more curve at the top and some thinning at the front. Just need a bit more work on the tip and then add the Chrysanthemum.
So the process of removing the concrete sealant begins. First of all I want to point out that I have now seen two types of this concrete sealant. The type in this ship is a very rubbery, tactile, sticky, rubbery silver gray. I think the brand is PB or something like that and it is VERY hard to pull out as it just wont release and you end up with a tiny piece of material in the jaws of your pliers. Look at the stern below... 2 hours of work and still not done. The other type we saw in a John Stangel ship was more white and less dense, and it DID come up very easily. It was not as dense as the product in my ship but it did come right up when you sliced below it and then pulled it up as one piece. I cant do that in the case of a wooden ship as there are wooden ribs.. so in the end the easiest way was to cut out the hull just like a fiberglass hull. I drilled pilot holes and initially tried cutting with a dremel cutting wheel but the actual dremel was to big to allow much penetration... so after $25 for the dremel cutter... I abandoned it for the Jigsaw that worked like a charm. Pictures below: This area was especially difficult to get out. I couldn't see the ribs for reference in drilling the pilot holes AND it's thickness made hard for the jigsaw to cut... still got through though. Here we are moving along on the drilling and cutting. The cutout was determined by where the top of the material was poured, I used my finger to find it and then drew the lines based on that. The bow cut out - Gerald is working on shaping the bow right now. So now a little more at mid-ships and in the stern and I can sand the bottom glue on some balsa and continue from there. I am playing with two ideas in my head, one is my standard and one is a suggestion from Jeff. 1. Glue balsa to the outside, pour in epoxy with micro-balloons into the open spots to fill in the area, strip off balsa .. done. Questions - will the epoxy hold to the ribs well enough? If I drop it or bang it will those squares pop out? If I had to remove it.. how easy would it be. 2. Use 1/32 plywood which is what I think was used before, prep the bottom for gluing it on sand it out and re-fiberglass the front. Then use the super foam on the inside, which is what I like to do. Then I can shape it any way I want but it will take more time than method 1. Any comments on that?
If I were doing it... I would probably temporarily 'sheet' the outside with something, probably could get away with just blue tape, paint in a thin layer of epoxy in the inside to make sure I got all the nooks and crannies before applying cloth, and then fiber glass from within. If I were worried about individual areas not adhering long term to the ribs I might run long strips of fiberglass cloth from section to section over the ribs, which i might cut down some before I did that.
Johnny, I used the metal "duct" tape from the big box stores. Has enough stiffness and just peels off. What doesn't peel off can be removed with a random orbital sander. Use fiberglass mat/cloth, if you are really concerned run some dowels between the ribs and make sure to wrap the mat/cloth around them. I used this method to build a new bow on the Duke V1 build. No issues. Call me if you want to walk through it...
Thanks Nick, VV, and Daisey.. I think I will do just that. I have some bamboo skewers that are easy to manipulate. I have used the blue tape successfully for this in the past but if the metal tape is the same as is used on a/c ducts then I have some. Otherwise I am not sure what it is. I just have to clean the rest of the sealant off the ribs so I can do this. I worked at it for a while last night... grrrrrrr Thanks
In fact I think I will put in just enough epoxy/glass to give me about 1/4 then come back over that with epoxy/micro-balloons to keep it light and tough.
tape it with the A/C tape you have, mat the inside. After cured, rip off the tape and put a thin fiberglass cloth and epoxy the outside. Just like Rick Asley said "never gonna leave you"
Haha I could have gone a few decades without that!!! Reminds me of a Jeff story.... (horrible flashbacks)
Put some chopped cloth in that mix to give it thickness. You are doing that hull more good than it deserves, way more work than I would have done.
Do as passed posts say and tape over the holes with the contour of the hull taken into account (shower pan liner?). Then lay in a thin coat of just west system to set up a hard shell, then when the epoxy is still tacky lay in a thin mix of chopped FG and micro balloons and west system again and level it out as much as you can in each rib bay. Before you do any of this you should lay in any wood that you need to form up the water channel, and cut out what isn't needed it the water channel. Or just plank over with thin ply (1/32") and foam the interior of that void, to form the channel and needed battery bays. At this point you have so much invested labor that you have to do it full out, and blow even more labor into the project. It will be worth it when it is done, but now it is just work.
I am sure the taping method will work, so I will do what all three of you said ... tape it up.. run a small amount of epoxy with dowel and chop/mat support, then again with some epoxy and micro-ballons. Once that is done I will pour the entire bow with foam and shape it for water channeling and such. FYI this is how I did the Baden in the method we are discussing... both the fiberglass and the foam parts. Here is a shot of the final result when thickening the ribs. I really liked the seam it achieved.. I was very surprised. In the case of foam I did originally put some long thin lead down before pouring the foam. I then used: X-ACTO Carving Router Assortment Set | X-ACTO Tools to shape it. It allows me to add grades to it like in a shower. Then I sand it and went over it with some silk like fiberglass / epoxy resin. View of the stern before carving it up: Stern after: This is all still in the boat today however on the amidships I carved out squares so the batteries could lay on the bottom of the hull. I will have the whole set of pictures posted on the Baden build thread soon.
Yep, same here. I have a VDT which will probably end up in the trash because it has that impossible to remove rubbery cement crack sealer.
I haven't used the concrete sealer before, but have considered it and from reading the horror stories about how hard it is to remove I was wondering why it would need to be removed?? I don't want to use it if it's going to be a headache later.
Yes I agree, Lets say you pour it in the hull THEN do some changes to the ship or maybe want to use a larger battery... you will need to remove some of it. In my case the ship was heavy and there was not enough weight left (before reaching Max Weight) to properly ballast the ship. I wanted to change the water channeling... had to dig it up If I want to change the trim of the ship from bow to stern... I can only trim by ADDING weight... otherwise I have to dig it up Then there is the issue that it never comes up 100% and epoxy does NOT stick to it so you have a weaker bond to the bottom of the hull The lure of the sealant is .. its so easy to just pour it in and it settles and makes a nice flat surface with a nice shiny skin. It can take a while to pour if you have to do many areas in which case try my method... lay some lead down in the hole, no glue.. and just pour the liquid foam right over it.. shape it with a gouge and coat it... done.. 1 day or less. Most folks say it takes no time to pour it in but may forget to include building the compartments that are needed to contain the sealant so it doesn't leak out all over the ship.. in the end I think it took less time to do the foam. I also want to point out that using sealant does not make a person evil!! It's a personal choice .. with consequences for the next owner.
