Moab

With spring coming, it was time to leave cold rainy and muddy jackson hole for warmer sandier places. Seems you run into quite a few jackson folks in the desert doing the same thing. Another great trip to moab. I never get sick of this place. Its my favorite sister town. 

Road trippin

We even got a gig

Awesome mountain biking

Fun exploring off the beaten path in Arches national park

Bush gap

Late night ghetto rig bike repair for porcupine rim. Hope my crank stays on !

Awesome fun exploring in the fiery furnace climbing, crawling, doing chimney manuevers and expolring endless slots

Topping out

As seems to be the norm in the spring, i came back to a burst of winter in jackson. Great pow the next few days. Winter redux

Winter

Ahh...where were we. Yes, winter came and it was too cold to do any boat work. But it was a great winter with great powder. My memory on my phone was full tho. So documentation is slim...

Some new gear

Great powder

Sketchy avalanche conditions

Got out of town to make the pilgramige to slc for a great weekend sniffing out steep north facing powder

Found a great seldom skied line that started steep

Got steeper

Had an icy ice buldge crux and ended with an 80 ft cliff you had to skirt

Our line right of center

Went back solo the next day to lap sweet lines in the upper basin

Before i knew it spring had sprung in jackson. We bailed on ski mountaineering due to warm temps and had a great day on the river. Spring is here!

Fair, sand, repeat

Still fairing here. Weather had been cold so i have been picking my windows to epoxy. I NEED to get the floor done so i can flip the boat boat over. The low spots are starting to bury. All my core is bonded. I think itll be ok in the end but its put me way behind schedule. Ive done 2 rounds of fairing. One mote full round and another on big spots and i should be ready to glass over the whole thing and make it look nice. Need to get some wider bagging material for the floor as the 60" stuff i have is gonne be just too short. Progress will be slow until i can get the floor done, and the boat flipped. Then i can move into the woodfired shop to continue to make parts in the cold. Heres some pics of the fairing process.

More repairs.

Well it's been about a month but I am slowly starting to get where I would have been had I just gotten the side right the first time. 3 rounds of vacuum bag repairs, lots of sanding, now it's getting the repairs leveled with fairing mix. Ill get it pretty fair, then do the bottom. After the bottom is done ill  bag additional 10oz cover glass to each side, fair, and flip

I also managed to get the transom bagged. First bag would not seal so I pulled more bagging material out and got it right on the second try. Came out good. Transom layup is 12ozbiax/poly/12ozbiax/10oz on the outside. Here's some pics. Making progress

Repairs that were vacuum bagged

Transom layup in the bag

When good things turn bad

So its been pretty quiet around here lately. I had a pretty huge screwup laying up the second side panel. I started late at night with the layup, and had some major leakage issues with my bag. I never could get it to seal. I chased leaks for hours trying to pull vacuum. But no dice. At 7am, delerious i should have pulled the layup and started over, but no such luck. I got like 3" on the pumpwhich isnt enough to do much of anything but get the peelply to lay flat. I convinced myself it was a hand layup and it would all be fine. But when i came back later i found like 20 air bubbles in the lam.

 After seriously considering sending the boat to the dump, i began the tedious task of fixing what i screwed up. Its been weeks now. I started by grinding all the bubbles out, down to core. I have been going thru in sections doing 10-15 small repairs at a time and replacing the layup in the low spots, and vacuum bagging the repairs. The bag pulls the materials very very flat and even into the low spots made by the grinder. Ill come thru with a second round of repairs to fill low spots in with 10oz glass patches, then come thru and sand the whole works flat with a longboard. A bit of fairing to cover low spots, and she will be ready for another layer of cover glass to make it look like i didnt frankenstein the side of my boat and to add a little more structure. More glass cant hurt right..., but ill pull the hull layup first. Its getting really cold real fast and i need to get this glass job done on the next nice day. Heres some pics

More supplies

A failed vacuum bag yields lits of voids...yikes

So i grind all the ones in the core out. Gotta look worse before it can look better. Noe i start tracing patches to replace my layup. 12oz biax on the bottom, 5oz poly in the middle, 10oz glass on top.

Glass all the patches in sections and use the vacuum bag to smoosh it all down. Result is nice repairs with little to no high spots. Awesome. Low spots will get another round of glass patches, and some cabosil filler to level em off. Then a new sheet of 10oz cover glass.