Project FloatingAbode Diary
25 January, 2001 Winter is in full swing. Dark, wet nights and, erm, dark wet days too! It's really hard to get anything done - I get home from work and feel like going to bed. It doesn't feel right to make any noise because it feels like everything is asleep. Nevertheless, I've been managing to get some things done... The chunk of wood is the frame for the polycarbonate disk that forms the rooflight. I was unable to get this done before having the shell sprayfoamed and so here you see the frame in the process of being 'foamed in'. The piece of ply is there to hold the foam up whilst it cures. The next pic shows foam being injected. The foam came from Screwfix. It's basically the same stuff that was sprayed on the rest of the hull. Using it is messy (it sticks to everything - even things you thought you'd tidied away) and awkward (the can must be kept more or less upright). I covered the the plywood I used for retaining the foam in clingfilm. This allowed me to take the ply down easily leaving the cling behind. A note for those of you that may wish to do something similar - PU foam is air curing and curing is aided by moisture. Clingfilm is an effective barrier to this and the foam tends to stay 'wet' for ages. I had to pierce the film to speed up curing... with the result that it dripped all over the floor... messily. You might want to try a moisture permeable membrane instead - grease proof paper? Moonshine and half of one of the rooflights insulated. A fully insulated rooflight. In the background is one that has also been trimmed back. I've only got two done so far. I was learning how to do it (and wasting partial cans of foam in the process). I'll do the rest all in one go. The rest of the pics show the manufacture of a prototype porthole trim in ash (again in order to learn how to do it). This image shows Deryck's saw table set up with a jig to get the right angle on the ring segments. It took quite a while to get the angle right, even then we couldn't get it spot on. Several million segments... felt like it anyway. The prototype 16 segment ring glued together and ready to be machined to round. Deryck succeeded in using a woodworking lathe to make an earlier prototype but it was a bit hairy as they're so big. Machining them proved to be much easier. I'm lucky to have access to a milling machine and rotary table at work. Machining the ring from polygon to circle. Like a knife through butter. Nice and round... ... but I didn't want a plain cylinder - I thought it might be attractive to add a slight chamfer to open up the porthole and allow the light to spread out. To do this, it was a simple matter of tilting the head of the machine. Cutting the chamfer. Finished. Looks really good. Now all I've got to do is make the real ones... hmmm.
