Industrial Systems Project Blog - Auburn High School » Hull

Quick and steady.

reaganw — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 06:05:26 +0000

Things have been going good for the deck group this week. We finally found a productive way to clamp down the skirt attach stips while the epoxy hardens: duct tape. When mentioned before, we turned it down because we thought it would not even come close to working. So we completed attaching all of the skirt attach strips and sanded them flush to the foam hull. Then we used expandable foam to fill even the slightest cracks in between the strips and the foam.
Next, we layed the 1/8″ plywood on top of the hull, traced it out, and then cut it. We ended the week by laying out the bag which we are going to use in vacuum bagging the plywood to the hull, which is our next step.

Speeding up again.

reaganw — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:36:08 +0000

Construction on the deck has been moving rather slowly lately. We had a lot trouble figuring out how to hold the skirt attach strips to the foam while the epoxy hardened. After attaching a few pieces of the skirt attach strip, our group decided to get a start on cutting out a hole in the deck for the lift duct to rest in. This step was much easier than any of us would have thought. This was definately a turning point from our slow pace.

Hull Updated

ahshover — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 04:28:29 +0000

It has been a while since I’ve updated the build log so I’ll do that now. I don’t have pictures now, but anything is better than what I’ve been doing.

The hull was assembled last Friday. We did put carbon fiber cloth in the center of the two layers of foam. I’m not sure yet what advantages we may have gained, but we wee hoping for more rigidity in the hull. The guys from V2 composites came out and did a wonderful job helping me and the students get the work done. They were AWESOME. They also provided the vacuum bag, carbon fiber, and epoxy resin. The hull has made even more progress since then. As of today the landing skids are cut and ready to go. The plywood pieces for the landing skids are cut and ready. They have sanded the top mostly smooth, with some slight work left to do before the lamination with 1/8″ plywood. We are hoping to ge the skirt attach strips on the periphery of the craft his coming week and then work on the hull getting the 1/8″ on top.

We are making fast and steady progress on the hull.

Hot wiring the hull

ahshover — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 05:25:34 +0000

The students came up with a great contraption with the hot wire. In order to make the hot wire process more stable and predictable they clamped the hot wire bow to one of the tool cartsfrom the machine shop. You can see a picture of it here.

Here are two different students in the hull group using the hot wire cart.

Hull issues

ahshover — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 05:09:14 +0000

In working with V2 composites we have decided to add a layer of carbon fiber between the sheets of foam. They cal the product V-Web. This firced us to hot wire the basic shape of the hull before we did the vacuum bagging. This forced us to find a temporary way for fastening the foam pieces together. We decided on a standard double sided tape. This wasn’t perfect, but it worked reasonably well.