Having decided to repair the rudder step one was to get the main stock rebonded. To do this I embedded two pieces of spruce. Rather than sand down the prior paint I decided to just pull off the carbon skin. This pulled the top layer of the spruce too leaving it pitted and rough so I filled the whole top. With it looking like a rudder again I sawed it into two pieces.... This is in order to work towards the final aim of both restoring the shape and also making the foil a LOT stronger than it was before. Aims are: Remove that big hole. It was way too big! Instead bond the down-haul into a smaller hole. Turn the foil into an I beam with carbon cross sections Thicken up with carbon skin from plan 1 Cutting the foil in half was a prep step towards step 2. To finish up I added two layers of carbon with an ash strip (about 1/8" thick) to replace the wood removed in the cut. Hopefully can finish up fairing tomorrow and get the foil skinned...
I'm hoping to finish this on part iv and do so this coming week but we'll see. The leading edge looked good but the rope fluffed up on sanding. The fluff sat down with a little epoxy but still not quite convinced by the penetration into the dyneema. Feels tough though so i'm going to go ahead and skin over it and we'll see in the long term. And epoxy and clamp it down again.
FarrOut is going to get its hull fair in two stages. The first before applying glass cloth to get the basic shape smooth and the second prior to painting. Fairing is done with West System 407 light filler. If you don't normally wear a mask I'd highly suggest donning one for this stage as the material is very light and tends to puff out off the mixing bowl especially as the additive is a fine dust. I learnt a few tricks during this process. Firstly wet the ply with a wet (neat) epoxy coat before applying the thick mixture as it won't penetrate the wood very well on it's own, but will chemically bond to the neat mixture you laid as a base. Secondly down strips of the fairing compound first. You can do this pretty roughly as they are easy to sand. Let them cure for a few hours and sand them down (see next tip) Notice that weird board sitting on the boat? That's my next tip! Make yourself a torture board. Mine is probably a little short the pros even b...
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