Week 2 reflection

This week went pretty well with building my surfboard. I had a couple of hiccups along the way, but I think I got the majority of them solved and out of the way. I believe that by midday Wednesday, I will have a finished board that just needs to be coated with epoxy and fiberglass. Going into this project, I didn’t think it would be as time-consuming as it was.  This week, I felt that I got a  bunch done on the board. I got the frame glued onto the bottom panel and the chine set up and ready to go for tomorrow. Back in week one, I made a big mistake that I thought I had fixed, but it turns out that I didn’t fix the issue. The issue was that I cut the bottom board too narrow in a couple of spots, making it hard to put nose and tail blockings in. Without that small and easily avoidable mistake, I could probably be at a point where the board would be exposed by Wednesday. Over the last two days, I have spent most of my time trying to correct that mistake, and I believe that I have figured it out. 

This week I learned a couple of new woodworking skills, such as how to use a draw knife. Another thing that I learned this week was how 5200 works and the strength of the adhesive. ( I think I probably spent 4 hours this week trying to remove 5200 in some spots). I also learned to have a lot of patients when working on things because getting in-patients just makes everything worse.

Senior project has been a nice break. I like not worrying about homework or test and just having a 10-minute blog every night. Only if high school could be this easy. With these next couple of days, I plan to put in some significant hours, probably around 10 to 12 hours a day. This amount of work should set me up pretty well to get the board done by Wednesday. I'm also meeting with my mentor for the last time tomorrow, and he should be able to show me how to do the next couple of steps on the board so that I can do less reading and more work during these next three days. I can’t believe that senior project is almost over, but it has been fun, and I can't wait for summer.

Total hours: 38


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Senior Project May 17th

Image
  Day 7 of senior project.  Today was a really effective day of work. I started today's work by gluing small strips of wood to the keel to help make it straight. After that, I spent a couple of hours setting up strongbacks to put over the ribs to help seal everything together when I glued up the whole board. When I finished creating the strongbacks, I headed off to baseball. After baseball, I headed back home to glue up the frame. I spent from 7:30 at night to 1 in the morning gluing the board up and attaching the strong backs hours: 10.5 total hours: 35.5
Read more

Senior Project May 12 2022

Image
  Day 4 of senior project. I'm feeling a lot better today. Hopefully, by tomorrow I will feel up to going to baseball. Today was probably the most productive day I have had for my board.  The morning started as usual with me reading the manual for the upcoming day's work. After that, I went out and bought some pipe clamps because on today's agenda was to glue the bottom of the board together. After buying the pipe clamps, I taped all the seems up to prevent the glue from leaking onto the floor and proceeded to glue up all the joints. By the time I was done gluing the joint up, it was 4 o’clock, and I needed to let the glue set for an hour, so I called the day there. Hours: 5 Total hours: 13
Read more

Senior project May 19th 2022

Image
  Day 9 of senior project. Today wasn’t a productive day at all. The majority of my day was spent cleaning glue and re-shaping the board. Re-shaping the board took me a while because I had to do it by hand with a draw knife. A jig saw wouldn’t be accurate enough and sander way too slow. After I finished cleaning up excess glue, it was 2:30, and it was time to leave and go to baseball practice. Baseball practice today was a bunch of fun we ended up playing basketball for the whole practice. After practice, I went to the play, which was better than expected. hour 5 total:43.5
Read more