Rib Joint Reinforcements

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RIB JOINT REINFORCEMENTS

\| April - May 2005		Well its the end of June 2005 and I haven't worked on the craft in about two months. The reason you ask? (you did ask didn't you?) Spring sprung and I was busy fulfilling my spring duties around the house. You know...flowers, mulch, power washing everything in site, organizing and in the end, everything looks about the same. On to bigger and better things....oh yea the Hovercraft I started building back in December of 2004.

Picture me in a hammock. June 13th, 2005		Today is June 13th, 2005 and I have some great news to share with you. Last week I had enough of the spring cleaning and made a B-line out of that rut. I am happy to report I am back into the swing of building the UH-12R Hovercraft and enjoying life as it should be lived.

June 13th, 2005		Before I can trace and make the reinforcement joints I need to perform some minor clean up on the structural ribs we just assembled. The Epoxy bonded so well that when I picked the ribs up off the floor (after the epoxy joints cured) I found out that the ribs were bonded to the floor!! Even though I thought I put a sufficient amount of paper between the rib and the floor, the epoxy saturated the paper enough to attach itself to my basement floor. As you might have guessed, the epoxy bond was stronger than my cement floor and part of my floor was pulled up when I pried the ribs off the floor. The clean up I mentioned above involved using a belt sander to grind the cement off the ribs. Who'ed-a-thunk?

June 14th, 2005		This week I traced and cut out all the reinforcement overlaps that will cover the already epoxied rib joints. This will give the joints additional strength (although I am almost certain the wood will break before the epoxied joints do).

June 25, 2005		I was off to a great start and almost cut out all the reinforcements out from the 1/4 inch plywood when the blade on my band saw broke. Curses! At least I was ready to call it a night as I already planned to cut the remaining reinforcements for the last rib the next evening. The only thing I will have to do is make an extra stop tomorrow during my lunch hour and pick up a new blade for the band saw.

June 26, 2005		Success!! Once again! The new blade has been installed and the remaining reinforcements have been traced and cut out. Here is a picture of all of my hard work that I performed tracing and cutting out each of the reinforcement pieces. There are a total of XX of them.

		The next step is to epoxy them over the already epoxied rib joints. As I mentioned before I am certain that the rib joints are already strong enough not only from the epoxy but due to how I assembled the joints themselves. To me the overlaps are more cosmetic than anything else.

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