Mayfly 14 Update 2

First Post - Update 1

It's not much, but here are some photos from my first filleting work ever. I wasted some epoxy as you can see by the trash shot. Dad has the sail done and is concentrating on finishing hatches spars and mast. He's coming down in early May to spend a week so we can get this thing done by the Midwest Messabout! We're both pretty eager to go.

Down in the bottom of my waste bucket, we see the remainder of the peanut butter, er, epoxy putty in a ziploc bag. This is a method that Jim Michalak endorses in his boat building book. It worked pretty well, til it sprung a leak very near the original hole. Basically, you take a zip lock bag, put the epoxy putty in it, then snip a corner off. You can then squeeze the bag to deliver the putty to the area you want to fillet.

This is a color scheme that I did using an old program called Top Draw. I snapped digital photo of the plans of the Mayfly from Jim's book (Boat Building for Beginners and Beyond). I imported the photo into Top Draw and traced the profiles of the lines in the plans in order to create polygons that could be easily filled with different colors. From here, I filled the various polygons with various colors (or in the case of the mast and spars I filled them with bitmap images (!) a neat feature the software). I put a bitmap of a pretty sky behind that, saved the file out as a bitmap, and voila. Unfortunately, Top Draw is no longer available for download, but I'm sure you could do the same thin in Visio, or some other such program.

These are various shots of the filleting. Not super pretty, but good enough for under the aft deck I hope.

Here I am in my respirator from 3M (model 07178). This worked great. It's a basic paint respirator with active carbon cartriges, and additional cloth filters in front of those. I could smell absolutely no epoxy. I assume this is good enough for epoxy fume protection. Let me know if I'm mistaken!