Project FloatingAbode Diary
18 July, 2000 Well I'm still skint but I have had some time to do some stuff... but first, something fishy: This was the view out of the side hatch this morning. The water is really clear at the moment and there are loads of fish everywhere. Back to Uisce: we've had a couple of weeks of awful weather and that's hampered things a little bit. It's been like winter - very heavy rain, wind, and cold. I made several false starts to get some work done but every time I did, it rained! Summer appears to have returned for now though and I haven't had much to do at work so I took yesterday afternoon off and did some work outside on the boat. The rooflights haven't had any attention since the builder cut the holes so I decided to tidy them up a bit ready for the glazing. I'm glazing them with polycarbonate discs supported from underneath and sealed in with silicone. I want to keep the roof uncluttered and with any fittings flush with the roof. I also don't want to have to polish nice brass surrounds etc. The holes were cut oversize with a torch and the edges were left rough as shown here: More on that bucket later. I need a clean edge with only a small gap to the PC disc so that the injected silicone forms a neat, well-defined bead. Next picture shows West System epoxy mixed with lots of microfibres applied to the thoroughly cleaned steel edge. I tried P40 initially but it didn't work very well. I then positioned a bucket underneath to catch the dust... ... and used a drum sanding attachment on a drill to sand the epoxy back to a neat edge: The drum sander worked really well. It didn't catch like I thought it might and it was just aggressive enough to allow high material removal rates with precision. Here are the first three sanded to size. They need the odd nick and depression filling in with P38 but apart from that, they're ready. The other four are still waiting to be sanded back. I think I should be okay with thermal expansion - the epoxy/silicone structure should flexible enough not to crack. We shall see... I have to wait until the roof is painted before putting the silicone seal in. Until then, it's plastic bags as rooflights! Deryck has been helping me with the porthole surrounds. After much deliberation, we've decided to turn them. Turned porthole trims for 18" portholes are not trivial but we're gonna do it anyway. Here's a prototype, photo's and most of the work courtesy of Deryck: That's all for now. Next update will probably be sometime in the next four weeks.
