#27: Mostly Tabbing (and Coving, a.k.a. Filleting)
How has your last eight months been? I don’t know about you, but I’ve enjoyed a long, fun, sometimes lazy, sometimes eventful summer break—oh, and a spring break before that and a solid start to the school year afterwards! I took such a long break from writing this blog that I yet again have to spend ample time familiarizing myself with how to do all the tech-stuff on said blog. (I’m a glutton for punishment.) I joked with Nick about getting A.I. to write this particular blog post if given pictures and videos going all the way back to February just to see what kind of gobbledygook it could come up with, saving me the overwhelm of trying to make sense of it all. (Of course I’d blame it on A.I. and have a good laugh if it didn’t make sense. And then I’d post it anyway just so I could move on with my life.) He chuckled but within an hour sent me a recently published article titled “I’m Begging You: Never Write with A.I.” The author of the article talked me down from the cyber-world ledge. I know it’s a slippery slope once I start letting A.I. speak for me. I’d start to lose my voice along with my brain. So here I am in the flesh and blood, attempting to get my brain and voice to play nicely together so I can untangle the last eight months. Let’s see now, what have we built on Felicity since February? If the following is incoherent, just be content that it’s gobbledygook from a fellow human.
Jumping right in: We adhered the three tapered tips of the foam stiffeners to the underside of the bridge deck. I hear vacuum bagging is in the stiffeners’ future. We still have to wrap them in fiberglass, after all.
In the stern cockpit, flat vertical panels were grooved and filled in with a thickened mixture of epoxy and fillers (microballoons and fumed silica) to form a curved front for some of the cockpit seats.
We did a lot of tabbing, which is secondary reinforcement of previously glued surfaces. When the surfaces aren’t flat, tabbing consists of making a fillet (or coving) along the joined panels with the epoxy + filler mixture. It acts as a strong base for the fiberglass tape over the joints and removes the sharp angle, spreading the stress load and reducing hard spots. So that’s basic tabbing. After tabbing, we take the additional step of laying peel ply over the fiberglass tape to absorb excess epoxy and reduce the amount of sanding.
A mirror comes in handy when blind coving. The white frame you see in the picture below acts as the backboard for blind coving under the sole in the bow. The wood frame is wrapped in plastic first so epoxy won’t stick to the frame, allowing for easier extraction once cured. Next, peel ply is wrapped over the plastic. Thanks to the peel ply, the cured epoxy will not have the super slick, smooth texture from the plastic, but instead have a resin-rich, perfect gripping texture. What will be left is a wide, floating fiberglass surface that is ready to be bonded to the underside of the lid, or sole as in the case of these pictures:
And Tristan found a different way of coving under the port sole. He says it was most comfy. I’m happy to just take his word for it.
But when there is a panel that goes on like a lid (like the underside of a seat), it needs to be attached to its supporting vertical face with fiberglass too. That is where a “blind cove” comes in. We made plastic-covered wood frames for the tops of the vertical panels and used those as our temporary backboards to form the coving—but this time, upside down and out of sight; hence, blind coves. Worked like a charm! Here are some pics of our seats without the tabbing, with the backboards, and with the tabbing as free as they’ll ever be.
The guys also affixed the ledges that lead up to each big berth, tabbing included.
We bonded our galley cabinets together and managed to get them up the stairs in one piece. It wasn’t very heavy at all. I think my Kitchenaid mixer weighs more than the cabinets. Makes me wonder if I should even have my mixer aboard. At least we’d have a backup anchor in a pinch!
Check out the video below to see it all in action. In July, we focused more of our attention on the forebeam, which is what I’ll focus on in an upcoming blog. The next blog, however, will be Tristan and Calvin’s mini projects they worked on in the first half of this year, in their own words.