Week 19th

I was assigned to work on the deck of the Wilson 8 m this week with Hof. Our task was to measure and prepare the materials for the fibreglass laminate. A brief was given to both of us by Brett on the various aspects and technicalities of the laminates. The laminate will be a three layer piece with the foam core sandwiched between to other 2 layers (one inside and the other outside) of Boat Cloth and Double Bias materials.

A list of questions was posted by Brett to us:

What is a laminate?

What materials to use?

What other materials are required - eg vacuum bag, peel ply, mat, etc...

Who? - People resource allocation

When? - Timing

How? - Process

Tools to use?

Resins to use?

Resource available =
What do we have in hand?
What do we need to do?
What have been done so far?

To me, these are the 4 Wives (W) and one Husband (H) questions which I am familiar with in my previous corporate work environment for various team tasks and individual projects. Questions are and always have been the Drivers of inquiry and data collection.

What Hof and I had accomplished this week are:
Take measurements of the areas to be covered by the laminated - 2.2 metre from the back to the front of the top deck and 800 mm for window slope portion and 1.3 metre to the stem point. 3 metres to cut for each pieces of the cloth - both for Boat cloth and DB.

Stock take of the what materials available (laying out the materials and measuring them on the lofting floor (floor needed to be clean first before spreading out the materials) - Boat Cloth - 36.4 metre and DB 12.6 metre.  We may have to use off cut materials for the DB (for the front portion of the deck towards the stem) as the requirements is not met by the DB 12.6 material available. The boat cloth available is more than sufficient.

Cut out the pattern for the boat cloth and the DB cloth. - we cut out all the materials into 3.2 metre length (to allow for the unusable ends of the materials which we tape up with masking tapes). One main learning point we gathered when cutting the material - was to tape up the end parts where we were making the cut first before cutting the materials. This made the cutting easier as well as the tape held the material together for better handling. The materials get stretched easily which made the task of handling the materials rather difficult. It was especially challenging when we tried to roll back the materials after laying it out for measurement.

Calculate the weight of a metre square of both materials - 432 gm per metre sq for the DB and 200 gm for the boat cloth.

Mark off on the mould where the cloth materials will be laid - there is a need to provide some overlapping of the materials - about 300mm.

Brainstorm how to lay the clothes. (Boat Cloth is 1 metre in width while the DB is 1.3 metre in width) - wwe would need 3 pieces of DB of 3 metre width and 4 pieces of baot cloth to cover the top part of the deck down to the front window. Another 1.3 metre width of material would be needed for the remaining part of the deck - the widest width is 3 metre, then 2 metre and then a triangular shape toward the stem.

Mark off and take out the areas where the inside laminate will end on the topside of the deck. The tricky part to lay the materials would be the front window area when the deck slope down and the side curve round.