Thunderstruck ! Counter to the Blunderjet thread

[WFO Speedracer]

While I was at it and had everything mixed up I went ahead and glued up the reducer to the bulkhead , looks just like Cinnabon icing but not nearly as tasty.

Once it kicks I will sand it , probably glue it from the inside then put a few layers of glass on it , then we can see about glassing in the driveshaft tube once I have the pump positively located.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

I went with the simpler is better approach , I just put parchment paper down and taped over the hole , then I flipped the ski over.

I used a mixture of chopped up carbon fiber and epoxy resin to fill in the hole , basically Tiger hair but with carbon fiber , then laid a layer of fiberglass on top of it to hold it in all place.

Then I put the pump in with a ratchet strap using folded up saran wrap around the pump seal area and flipped I it back over.

I used the remaining Tiger hair to fill in the place I cut out and covered that with parchment paper and worked it into the hole really well, this is the best Idea I could come up with , I will layer over it with a layer of carbon fiber later to get the strength back , right now I am way more worried about conformability than durability , the part the seal mates to has to be damn near perfect , other than that it's a pump tunnel , it doesn't have to be that pretty on this side.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

Untaped it , it isn't horrid but it will need some love fo sho !

 

[Myself]

Looking good to me!!

 

[WFO Speedracer]

Looking good to me!!

Inside of the tunnel gets gelcoated when the bottom does , gelcoat hides all !

 

[Myself]

Heck,......nobody will be looking in there anyway!

 

[WFO Speedracer]

Heck,......nobody will be looking in there anyway!

Pride in workmanship , I am old school , if you wouldn't sign your name on it to let the whole world know that you did it then don't let it leave your shop till you can.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

I know it looks like I just stopped on this build because that is exactly what happened, but for a good reason this time .
My Fiancés' sister was visiting for Thanksgiving and her child is in a wheelchair , both my fiancé , her sister and her child also suffer from Myotonic dystrophy , in her case it is not overwhelming , she goes to exercise five times a week and you wouldn't know she had it if you didn't know .

But she sometimes has trouble getting up and down steps so we needed a ramp and I had promised to build her one , which I did , I had it built and useable before they got here but I still have a few trim boards and staining to do to finish it up but for the most part it is done , I figured the materials really closely and had just enough left over to build this jet ski stand, I will post pics of the ramp when I am completely done in a few days.

It's just a wooden stand but I put it together with halflap joints , the 4x4's are half lapped , the 4x4s were notched at the top for the 2x4's and the 2x4 bunks are set into notches on the cross pieces , there is no place on the stand where just the screws are carrying the load , the size of the stand was of course dictated by the size of the lumber that was left over , but all in all not to shabby for a quickie..

At any rate it is now an official build since it is sitting on a stand.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

I finally got a decent day here to do some fiberglass work , it's been cold and wet here for weeks now.

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=gambit meme deadpool and wolverine&mid=3249580A7F14DBA02ABF3249580A7F14DBA02ABF&ajaxhist=0

Anyway I scuffed up the surfaces with a wire wheel and a close quarter drill and then wiped it down with Zylene ,I made a couple of spreaders out of wood, eyeballed the angles and cut them down to the right size by trial and error, mostly error. I ended up at about 25 1/4" so I spread it out about an inch .

The goal here is to equalize the stresses so 1 inch out on the bottom deck plus the thickness of the glass I added and 1 inch in on the top plus the thickness of the glass I add there , that should get me really close .

Then I taped it up to contain some of the epoxy mess and make damn sure the epoxy doesn't get between the spreaders and the hull , then I laid down two layers of 3" fiberglass tape, it will probably need at least two more before it's all said and done.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

I cut one piece in half , then laid up two 1.5' pieces on the outer edge , then I followed up with one more 3" piece over the top , when you bend the hull out like this it tends to make the outside edge droop just a bit , it also loses the 90 degree angle to the bond rail. flange

I doubled it up that outside edge to build it back up some , now I am looking at adding some wooden spacer blocks under the edge to hold it out a bit while it kicks off and see if I can get the 90 degree angle back in place , I will be quite interested to see how much the hull actually deflects back inward after the epoxy kicks off.

I ended up cutting a bunch of small wooden locks and forcing them under the edge of the bondrail , the straighter I get it now the less I will have to clamp it when I put the hull back together , you know what they say, wood is good !

I have probably added more glass layers than it came from the factory with so basically I have now doubled the thickness of the bond rails.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

I checked it this morning and it had pretty well kicked off , but I am just going to leave the blocks in for most of the day just to be sure.

Now I laid this bond rail all up at one time or at least before the first layer of epoxy kicked off , anytime you can do that do it, you get a stronger bond with less chance of separation , also the more material and epoxy you pile on there the more heat it creates and it kicks off a lot faster.

We have a really good weather pattern developing here over the next few days , it hits 65 today, 72 tomorrow and 75 on Wednesday , so I will get the rest of it laid up shortly and I have a few water tests to get done. as well .

 

[Myself]

Very nice. I've always liked the looks of the Thunderjet. Maybe someday I'll find one that I could fix up.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

Just out of curiosity and to make sure I am not totally screwing this up I set the top back on the ski , it looks like I will be pretty close and most likely not have to force the top in at all, it depends on the springback I get when I remove the spreaders so I will know for sure in a few days, but now I do know for sure that I am on the right track here.

I can glue it all up with the front spreader in there but the rear one has to go, anyway I have to do some mods to the engine cradle-firewall so maybe that can be modified up to hold the hull apart, we will see when it get that far.

For some unknown reason they made the bottom flange longer that the top one, it's greatly exaggerated in that pic but on the front and rear corners you can see it , on a factory hull the rubber rub rail covers it up and you don't see it, on this one I no longer have the factory rub rail so I will be cutting the bottom to flush up with the top most likely before it is all glued back together .

At any rate you can easily push the two halves of the hull together at the flange so it should clamp up nicely .

About the clamping I have been thinking on this one a lot , I think I will take a 2x2 and cut a groove in it the thickness of the bond flanges , then I set the bond flanges inside the groove and clamp it up , this will spread the load out a lot more without using a zillion clamps , I do have a ton of spring clamps but only so many c-clamps and welding clamps , I have a table saw so it's a cakewalk for me to do it this way .

The last two pics show exactly what I am dealing with here , the gap difference does not show up in the pics as well as it does in person but I have a significantly larger gap on the right side than on the left side , some of that will close up when I glass the rail on that side , but you can just slightly pinch the Left side with your fingers and it closes right up.

Not so on the right side ,it takes a lot more force to get it pulled up tight , I can add a lot more glass to the top rails and will probably do a couple of layers there but I think I know how to get the rest of the gap out of the right side without getting carried away there , we will see. I do realize you need some gap there as epoxy works better with a bit of a gap fill .

 

[kevbo]

I like to use 10-32 countersunk screws when joining the deck. Drill holes same size as the screw and nothing can get out of alignment. Once it’s perfect you can take it apart for final prep and bond. No clamps needed.

 

[Myself]

I'll bet it's going to have very little (if any) springback to it after you remove the spreaders. As for the flange.........well.......I'm going out on a limb here and gonna say OVERALL fit-n-finish was "good enough". I mean, why spend any more time making everything real nice when they could just hype it up in advertisement and sell people a mediocre product for top dollar!!!..........OH WAIT.......that's EXACTLY what they did LOL!!!!!!!!!!!! Yours will be FAR superior to ANY stock machine they ever built!

 

[WFO Speedracer]

Well I got out the 4 ft level and it confirmed my suspicions, the right side rail is bowed down in the middle , you should know by now that I just roll with the punches so I just kept on rolling.

I prepped the right side and laid it up , it was turbo speed compared to yesterday and it laid up very quickly, then I set out to try and correct the bow in the rail , I put brick's , blocks , old batteries and whatever I could find inside of the hull on the right side , tied the other side down to the stand and jacked it up with boards , bricks and wedges left over from the ramp construction.

Putting the 4ft level up close to it it looks reasonably straight , again I don't know how much springback it will have, I did take one of the spreaders out before I started glassing it up and there was very little spring-back with one removed , we will see exactly how much sometime tomorrow but I think Myself is correct.

Now as for my rig , yes it's totally redneck but I am in Alabama so I am good there, we have redneck fully covered here.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

I put all the blocks in before it kicked , it's still slightly tacky but kicked enough that I could put the level on it, at the moment it's straight , lets hope it stays that way .

I had a feeling the whole time that this hull was racked somehow but I never figured it would be racked in two totally different areas and on different axes and before you ask yes axes is the plural of axis , go figure , who the hell came up with this English language anyway ?

 

[WFO Speedracer]

I removed the spreaders and blocks then took some measurements ,it sprang back about 1/4" in the middle and 3/4" at the back, I will leave the middle spreader bar in when I join the two halves back together , at the rear the firewall-engine cradle should hold it apart just fine ,so no biggie , as for the bow in the rail , it's now gone, I laid the 4ft level across it and now it is very straight , it's probably straighter than the left side is .

I have enough fiberglass tape to cut it in half and get two layers per side plus a layer on the front and back of the lower hull , It's getting close, really close and it's so much better than what I started off with that it's not even funny.

Pay attention Albert Mardikian , this is how it should have been built to start with , these were low production , hand built machines, there really is no excuse for the way this was put together by Laserjet Performance.

Of course I had to sit the top back on it to check it out and see how it fits , I mean at this point why wouldn't I ?

Most of the gap is gone and I think with a couple of layers of tape on the top rail section I should be golden here , so sometimes simple solutions are the best solutions .

 

[WFO Speedracer]

Time to give the top deck some love , first I had to remove the remainder of the green glue of death , only two things in the world make that glue let go , impact and heat , I will be using both here .

I use a propane torch, a heat gun will work but a torch is a lot faster , heat a small section at a time , about two inches max, heat it till it turns brown or black, it only takes a few seconds per section , then with a large flat blade screwdriver and a dead blow hammer I work it loose one section at a time till it's all gone , it took me maybe ten minutes to remove all that was left on here which wasn't a lot as you can see in the pics.

I will clean up the rest with the drill and wire wheel , wipe it down with Zylene and start laying down some fiberglass tape and resin.

The last pic is of it removed , you want every speck of it gone and back down to bare glass.

 

[WFO Speedracer]

Throwing up a couple of pics so you understand why all this is even necessary , one is the min thickness , the other is the max thickness of the top hull at the bond rail , that measurement is in MM's.