Saturday, September 01, 2007

Building up float bow caps

The question of the day for me was whether to glue together all the little foam scraps or to purchase some thicker foam stock? Thinking about lightness, I wanted to minimize the amount of glue in the bow cap.

I decided to use the scrap pieces and proceeded to cut them up into rectangular shapes to make it easier to glue.


I actually practiced laying out the foam pieces not sure how complicated a job this was going to be. In the end it was very straight forward and I was happily cutting pieces to fit as I went along.

I used a polyurethane glue that tends to foam as it cures and used my daggerboard case mold to good advantage for clamping.

Here are the raw over sized blocks of foam. Not very pretty.

Now they are slightly better looking after some work with the planer and sander. Still slightly over sized, I think they are ready to glue onto the bow, when the final shaping (foam sculpting) can begin.

Monica took a surprise shot. It looks like Cameron in the background is getting psyched up to lift this very heavy float.

1 comment:

Jay said...

Looks good. I wish I had done it this way instead of using brand new 3/4" foam. I inventoried my foam scrap stockpile and I have an incredible amount of waste -- more than enough to have made two bow caps... :) or should that be :(

Jay