Thread: Another OZ MK2 PDRacer build in Sydney "Wood Duck"

Judging by what's going on (or coming down) here, the stress testing of the system can start
Good luck, Alex


Screwing up in new ways every day

I went to Alex's on Wednesday to have a look at the damage.

It is very much because of the boat being full of water and overbalancing on the trailer. There is a long split along the chine on the port side and the side in that area has become detached from the framing etc. The good thing about this is that it really is going to glue down again well and easily. The break is clean and gives good access to regluing the frame areas.

So that is the first part to fix ... once it is stable then the second part which is a bit more messy and seemingly complex can be ignored in a bid to make it a more simple repair.

As the side panel tore away it was restricted by the front bulkhead, so the ply has torn in that area quite badly and it doesn't push together very well. Then there is messy cracking along the chine and partway up toward the gunwale at the bow that also is messy. Happily the area below the gunwale is actually still glued down quite well.



Because this doesn't push together and there is no access from the back I am recommending that Alex sets his router to 4mm and remove a piece of plywood on the side of the boat that goes from the bow about 75mm (routerwidth) below the gunwale back to 50mm behind the front bulkhead and then straight down to the chine (using a guide temporarily clamped to the plywood. Then work along the chine to fully remove the ply sticking to that.

It is a really easy job because of the absence of fastenings in the structure

This will remove the front section of the side panel but leaving clean edges 75mm below the gunwale and about 50mm into the cockpit from the forward bulkhead.

Then put 80mm wide butt strap in the front buoyancy tank to join the new section in along its top edge. And a butt strap 100mm wide - its front edge will butt up against the back edge of the bulkhead to connect the back part of the patch to the hull side panel.

Finally cut a replacement piece, dry fit it to make sure everything is OK, coat the inside face wet on wet and when the the third coat goes on glue the new piece in place.

Then trim and round the chine. YOu could ignore glass taping until the repaint stage. I'm recommending that the repair be epoxy sealed and then the boat used for sailing until winter comes round.

All the other boats will think that Alex is not afraid to insist on his right of way!

I would suspect this will take a total of about three hours but on three separate days as there are three epoxy processes.

Best wishes
Michael.

Well, I drop out for a bit and thing start hopping. Alex, you are going to be an expert at repairs. Look at the bright side. Look at all the sanding ahead.

Well, will be following along with baited breath to see the wee little boat come back to life.

D.

Hey Alex - you've been very quiet for a couple of weeks - what's happening?
cheers
AJ

Hello Everyone, as the inimitable Karl Haas used to say ;). Sorry I missed various posts - the warning emails must have got lost in my email stream.

We've been dealing with builders and kitchen renovations (the Boss put her foot down and got some stuff in the kitchen fixed), and I managed to hurt the tendons in my wrist by practicing too long a couple of weeks ago, which ahs made using the keyboard - and practising - rather painful, so I have stopped doing either until the damage heals.

Which also means that there will be something of an hiatus before I get at the boat; I have some great excuses to avoid doing anything to it at the moment ;).

BTW, MIK, thanks for the useful summary of the fixes necessary - a great reference for me :).

Cheers,
Alex.

OK. Right. Well.

I have now managed to do in the other (left) wrist and elbow by practicing too much while tense (that's the simple explanation: the reality is a little more complicated than that). To the extent that the phsyio who I have been seeing for this injury has banned me from playing in Concert Band for the foreseeable future, and restricted said practice to 7 minutes of long notes only per day, no finger movements, merely to keep my embouchure from getting slack. That may mean that I'll get to work on the boat a bit.

The weather here has moved back into a more typical autumnal pattern, what is rain-free :). It may of course be moving back into the El Niño pattern as well, which means drought. The spring (thanks, AJ ;) is still flowing strong, between 5 and 10 litres/hour (most recent estimate), but it may be showing signs of slackening as well. I have a new and better pump, having destroyed the previous el cheapo item.

Here's some snaps of recent goings-on. Note that Flickr now have yet another "large medium" size, 800 x 600 px:

1. The creek as it usually looks; unless it's completely dry, of course...





2. The creek in full spate, photo 1. The drains in the street above us (exiting into this creek) blocked up, and as there was nowhere else for the water to go, it shot down the road and through the easement between us and the next door neighbour - in a mighty torrent! Unfortunately I wasn't quick enough to get a snap of that event...





3. The creek in full spate, photo 2. Note the brown colour of the water





4. The creek in full spate, photo 3. A foaming cauldron at the foot of the waterfall





5. Digging the new sump into the ironstone. At this preliminary stage it's about 300 mm across and 400 mm deep





6. Enlarging the sump to fit the pump, also showing the builder and his jack-hammer





7. Pump installed: this is the builder's pump, which shorted out a week or so later. It didn't like being constantly immersed...





8. Drainage channel connection the two main sections of the taddie pond





9. Close-up of installed pump





10. Ye new pump :). This is a more expensive, Italian-made model that runs far more quietly, and came with a non-return valve included as a standard item. Closer inspection of this snap will show that the pump has a self-contained float-valve, which makes it a little more compact that its predecessor. It also sucks down to 2 - 3 mm (as opposed to 75 - 90 mm with the other two pumps). On the other hand, it runs more often as the float isn't adjustable





11. Ye new pump, installed. I am going to put the pump on a timer so that it runs once every six hours (at current rate of influx), which is a nice balance between running once a day and once every five minutes. This photo shows the results of 5+ hours of water collection (there's a lot more off to the left that can't be seen here)



Follow this link to my Flickr account. Watch out for the puddles and wear some rubber boots...



Regarding the fixing up of the boat, I measured the base of my Bosch trim router the other day, and I can get away with a gap of 45 mm 'twixt edge of base and radius of bit - which will make things a lot more comfortable trimming off the shattered section of hull side. You never know, I might even get around to it real soon now ;)...

Alex, I still reckon you should be bottling & selling the water.
Maybe mix it with barley, hops & yeast to add further value...

and thanks for the plug for Ozito as used by a 'professional'..
Been tossing up between a "brand name" 5 Joule/hit rotary hammer @ $600-ish or an Ozito for $110-ish.
Must do: 45 x 16mm x 120mm holes in a concrete wall.
Might also have to do: 350 x 16mm x 250mm holes.
Then break away the concrete between those holes to remove excess footing
in front of the wall on my neighbour's side of the boundary.
Am hoping to hide the excess footing behind permapine lattice.
but only half heartedly. Some of it is just too... in-yer-face.

So, much as I would prefer to never buy a cheap tool again, the price difference makes it hard to walk past the Ozito.
Especially when the change would pay for a full-on leccy jack-hammer...

AJ

You know Alex, I think you are going about it all wrong. A small area of pea gravel to rake. A couple koy. Some cute little tree frogs. Maybe a recirculating pump to feed a waterfall. Put up a couple grow lights and have your own little in-house tea garden. Just the thing to create that zen feeling when in the workshop.

As a bonus, it keeps the humidity constant so you don't have to worry about wood movement. Enlarge it a bit and you even have a place to float test the boat without taking it out so it doesn't get filled with water.

Originally Posted by dkirtley

You know Alex, I think you are going about it all wrong. A small area of pea gravel to rake. A couple koy. Some cute little tree frogs. Maybe a recirculating pump to feed a waterfall. Put up a couple grow lights and have your own little in-house tea garden. Just the thing to create that zen feeling when in the workshop.

As a bonus, it keeps the humidity constant so you don't have to worry about wood movement. Enlarge it a bit and you even have a place to float test the boat without taking it out so it doesn't get filled with water.

I agree, that would be just the ticket, indeed, you could sell tickets for rides in the boat, to pay for it's re-construction....

BTW, I want one also.... (the peaceful tea garden...)

Stephen

I'll give you the inside running on the Chinese Tea Ceremony and drop off some nice Wulong tea!

MIK

G'Day Bruces and Brucettes,

A tempting idea, value-adding to the spring water by various means. Any koi would have to be rather on the small side, and it would be a strictly tea-for-one situation and therefore a queue. I would be quite happy about the moisture content of the timber if it weren't for the moisture content of all my machine tools.

Anyway...

Here's the latest on what I got up to today:

1. Bosch palm router with twin-flute straight bit: depth more-or-less set correctly





2. Lining up the vertical guide





3. End result of vertical cut after several passes: the guide kept slipping. The squiggly slot was a test cut





4. Setting up the horizontal guide. This one was glued temporarily in place using hot-melt glue. That was always the intention: I should have done that with the vertical guide as well, but I didn't want the glue on the area tof the hull that wasn't being removed, and the scrap area was too uneven...





5. Dremel (= Bosch) holt-melt glue gun





6. Horizontal and vertical cuts made. If I'd been thinking clearly, I would have changed over to a 25 mm bit at this point and done the area over the cockpit bulkhead, then fitted the fence and run along the bow transom and hull bottom to clear the glue/plywood areas. But, as usual, I wasn't thinking clearly...





7. Close-up of the "vertical" cuts: they should also have been parallel with the cockpit bulkhead, not 90* to the gunwale





8. Piece of paulownia framing ripped out along with the plywood at the bow end. This probably happened when I was attempting to lever off the piece of plywood - not when the boat hit the ground





9. Mucking about with the router... I'll need to do the cockpit bulkhead with the Perma-Grit block later - not that that will be particularly difficult ;)





10. Damaged area of foredeck. The protruding piece of fractured ply having been removed. Lots of epoxy, glue and cloth needed here. That branch mad a bit of a mess of things...





11. View of the forward buoyancy tank, damaged plywood removed. Not that the spiders have already colonised the tank





12. A little bit tidier. I stopped at this point to rest my injured wrist and have a think...


Follow this link to my Flickr account - recently re-upgraded to "pro" status for your enjoyment



I'm going ot have a bit of a think about the rest of the procedure for a bit: I have to work out where on one of my six sheets of 4 mm gaboon that I'm going to extract the piece for the patch - and the butt-straps/ Although the latter might come from the 6 mm PM ply that I originally got for the Goat. As for the Goat: it, the kayak and the Eureka canoe have been put on hold indefinitely...

Here's what I got up to today:

1. Palm router with fence and 25 mm CMT bit, plus Perma-Grit flat file. For this job it would have been better - for the expensive CMT bit - to have bought a cheapie and used that to chew off the glue





2. Removed section more-or-less cleaned up. Just a few bits of chisel-work in some corners will finish it off





3. Cockpit bulkhead was cleaned up with the perma-Grit block in the background. Plus the coarse flat Perma-grit file peeking out at the top of the photo. Note where I went to far with the router - it will patch up fine with some gloop. The bit depth was also set a bit too deep, but that will also be made up with the gloop





4. Corner between bow transom and hull bottom cleaned up with a chisel (which now needs sharpening)





5. Top forward corner awaiting a sharpened chisel...


Follow this link to my Flickr account...



Next step is to cut out some bits from one of the canoe/kayak gaboon sheets - for which I'll need to have a look at the set of kayak offsets. This will take some time and won't happen immediately. But at least I've got started...

In case anyone's wondering what's been happening: nothing. I've been rather down in the dumps lately, which hasn't been helped much by finding that recent deluges have got into my expensive collection of unusual taps, dies and other cutting tools, by dint of the positioning of the various drawers in which they were stored. I thought I'd moved them out of the reach of potential flooding, but obviously not far enough... Fortunately, my habot of sousing such things in anti-rust compounds may have paid off in some cases.

Quick query to MIK if he's still reading this: I've forgotten whether I should be using 6 mm- or 4 mm-thick butt-straps. At this point I'm assuming that I can get away with 4 mm, but I thought that I had better check.

I have got to get me one of those router thingies. Really cool the way it takes
the ply down to just the right depth in just the right places. Without risk to the
structure if you stray off-line. Unlike, say, a jig-saw or chain-saw...
If it's any comfort, you're making more progress with the Duck than I am with
my TS16.
cheers
AJ