Over the past two weekends Ive done a lot of work on my Laser. Alfonso came down last weekend and we worked 12+ per day on Friday Saturday and Sunday. Most of my time was spent cleaning up my deck and laying glass. In order to fix the mast step I had to cut a hole in the deck and lay some glass and epoxy around its base. Before I can spray new gel coat on the deck I have to patch that hole and make the deck smooth, then cover the deck with glass. The first photo below is showing the glass lip I attached to the inside of the hole, to hold the piece I cut out. Next was to actually place and level the piece of foam and glass that was cut out of the deck and lay some glass on the seam to seal it in. In the second photo below you can see where the bondo is on the bow section. In this photo I have already laid up two layers of glass over the bondo. earlier in the week I had been putting two layers of glass over the whole deck and cockpit which really strengthened the deck and there is now zero flexibility anywhere on the deck.

Once the glass on the deck was complete it was time to start spraying the hull once again. we put two coats of red gelcoat on the hull a week ago and now it was time for about 5 more. We actually ended up running out of red gel coat before the process was complete so I have to purchase another two gallons. The waterline stripe from its previous gel coat job was showing through even 7 thin layers of gel coat as you can see in the last photo.  I still have a lot of work to do to get this thing ready to sail but the process is nearing completion.  I still need to do some sanding in the cockpit to prepare it for gel coat and then comes the deck gel coat along with non-skid.  After that its just a matter of getting the thing rigged and spraying the foils (centerboard, rudder)

I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=41358BA1DE3D28BC

Today I decided to figure out how snow machines work, you know, the kind that the ski resorts use to make snow when its cold but not snowing. I found this cool site, http://www.snowathome.com/ which has several different plans for making snow machines of different kinds. I chose this one because it was the only one that didn’t require a pressure washer, only an air compressor. On the down side it doesn’t have the highest output but we’ll see how it works, that is of course if we get another cold enough night. I’ve setup the air compressor in the sound room so I can run it at ~4am without disturbing anybody while I make my snow.

I found most of the parts at The Home Depot tonight with Matt Jeff and Jeff. It cost me ~$34 including a new garden hose and seems to spray the water in a fine mist that will hopefully make nice snow if it gets cold enough outside. The only issue with this method for making snow, at least with the way its currently built, is the possibility that water will push back into the air hose and into the air compressor. This would destroy the air compressor and would most likely cause other problems since the air compressor is practically inside. The weather report says it wont be cold enough tonight so all I can do now is hope it stays cold for a while. You can see my pictures of this build on flickr

This week has been very cool. So cold in fact that the driveway at my house froze over and I am now unable to park my car in the garage (down the hill) for fear of not being able to drive up the hill when I need to be somewhere. Yesterday the ice on the driveway didnt melt because the house blocks the sun from the driveway all day. This picture was taken at about 1pm and only some of the ice had melted.

I remember as a child during a big freeze year we would run the hose all night to create an ice hill to sled down in the morning. I think I’ll try it again tonight and see what happens in the morning. There are sill a few more days of sub-freezing temperatures at night on the forecast and I hope to bring back some memories. Now if it would just snow so I can take some friggin pictures!