Ok, in the morning today, Harold sanded the inside of the console to put on the microballons to fair it out. Sanding inside stinks.
After that, he went home and showered and me and harold decided we were tired of sanding and wanted to do something more fun. So I paid a couple of guys to run the orbitals today on the outside while me and harold built stuff, but more on that later. During the sanding, we learned something awesome on our last restoration. We used to wet sand with 400 grit by hand with the blocks to get all the eggshell out. That's what I was always told was necessary. Sanding by hand is stupid hard though. What we learned, is you can do the worst part, the 400 grit, with just velcro disks and an orbital. The rest you have to block sand, but the 400 with the orbital saves YEARS of sanding. Here's the unlucky soul that we put up to sand the outside with the orbital. He got done in just one day though, but he burned about 75 disks.
You can REALLY tell the difference after the 400 grit goes around. This is a picture before the border was sanded, and you can see the eggshell on the border, but how flat the sides came out:
Ok, while the sanding people were suffering, i had fun with my new radio that just came in. It's bluetooth so customers can play music from their phones while they fish. Technology is soo cool, they didn't have this kind of stuff when I was growing up
I went ahead and cut the holes to mount the speakers in the bottom of the overhead electronics box.
And then we stuck the speakers in to "make sure they fit"!
I really like the speakers. They are Fusion 200 watt 6.5 inchers, so they will sound good, but they are relly plain on the outside so they don't draw too much attention.
While I was playing with the speakers, Harold wanted to paint the inside of the live well black. Fish like black better, I don't know why, but they live alot longer when they are in the dark?
And then since there weren't anymore fun projects on this boat we could do, we decided to build some corecell/carbon fiber electronics boxes for my 30 and 32 foot boats. They both have boxes like this up in the tower were the gauges, gps, sonar and vhf goes. Right now I just this mold that looks like this, but each box weight about 35 pounds. The new boxes will weigh in at 3 pounds, so that will be 32 pounds times 4 boxes so we're taking 128 pounds out of the boat, or a small passenger. Not bad, but materials for the two boxes will be around 400 bucks, or 100 bucks a box. I also had a problem with the old heavy boxes cracking the aluminium supports that holds them up, making the boxes weightless will get rid of that problem. I started by tracing the big box we are using in the new "Quepos 28"
Then I did that 8 times. Then I put the sides I am going to use together and sanded them so they are exactly the same. I did this for all four pairs.
Then we measure out the other top bottom and back and cut those out.
Then we use cabosil and resin to make glue and start putting them together
You can see on the last picture we used nails to hold them together while the glue dries. Should be dry in about an hour and then I'm going to put the back on, sand them down and put on the carbon fiber, I'm waiting for them to dry now...