A little later Adrian and I first looked into methods for reducing the rudder's weight, mostly by hawging out the rudder wood. The 1" poplar is way stronger than we need. I'm hoping to keep the frame but cut out all the interior space and stretch a fabric/plastic across it to block the wind but be much lighter than the whole volume of wood.
But we decided to first take on reinforcing the perimeter of the body with fiberglass. We started by sanding down the surfaces and rounding things off slightly near the cleats.
Below you can see the timelapse of us adding the fiberglass.
With the reinforcements around the perimeter I expect the craft to be much stronger. Previously it was relying on the foam to transfer loads between the sheets of plywood. Now the foam can just be a spacer. The full box beam has not been completed as the bottom corners are not completed, but it's way stronger.
The bottom corners are going to be much harder to do as they're both inside the skirt and include the bottom edge. The epoxy will hold somewhat on the bottom, but it won't be as clean as if I flip the whole vehicle over to fix it. I'll probably defer it to later when I am ready to redo the skirt with the final material.
With Adrian applying the epoxy and me flushing it down with my fingers we went through a lot of gloves. It wouldn't have been too many, but we needed to break out the scissors for the handles, and cleats, as well as the corners. And I needed to break out and cut more strips at some point.
At the rear we removed the rudder hardware and applied the fiberglass to the surface. Once the epoxy has hardened we can remount the hardware. (It's the oarlock mounts.
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| The hovercraft with the epoxy setting around the perimeter. |
And as a bonus. Adrian brought his new FLIR camera which plugs into his phone and took these pictures of the heater running. It's way hotter than 216 degrees but you can see that it's overloading the sensor. The blackspots on the top of the heater register as 4 degrees F according to the camera.
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| An IR view of the heater running. |
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| The temperature on the ceiling above the heater, even with the fan running. |
