J/30 Class Association Forums J/30 Forum The Boat, Sails and Equipment Rudder(s)

Ok, This may really be one of those Crazy A.... projects, but if this thing lasts as long as it should, it may be worth the effort. It took all morning to lay out the glass, breather, peel ply and get ready to glass this thing. It took all afternoon to actually glass this thing and then get it under a vacuum. This is a project best done with some extra hands, but they weren't around, so on we went. Remember this blank is just under 70 lbs. and I just had a bunch of hand surgery two months ago, so this was too much fun.

Wetting out the 29 oz. stuff is always fun, but that went ok. adding the next two layers of 10 oz. cloth went ok too. What turned into a near fiasco was flipping this thing to do the 2nd side. What I had not planned for was the position of the vacuum port after the flip, Turned out I was going to flip right on top of the thing. I knew that would be bad so I started moving a wetted out, very heavy rudder and all the cloth, breather, peel ply etc. so that when I rolled the thing over it wouldn't be on the port. That was about 30 minutes of adventure. Got it done though.

Then wetted out the 2nd side and worked through all the layers of cloth. The shape of this rudder adds some complexity because of the 3" step below the bottom gudgeon. I had sorted that out to a point in advance, but it still makes for a higher degree of difficulty.

So everything was wetted out, in place and ready for vacuum. Well I quickly figured out I had damaged the sealer plastic in the fiip onto the vacuum port. So I removed the port, moved it to a new location and I thought I had adequately sealed up the old port hole. Turned on the vacuum pump and started doing the normal stuff trying to figure out where the vacuum leak is. About 20 times around the seal tape, 10 times around the port itself, a couple of times around the vacuum lines and then finally I figured out that the tape over the old vacuum port hole didn't cover the entire hole. So one more piece of tape and then this thing really started to suck as it were.

So it took a good 4 hours to wet it all out and get into a vacuum. I planned that it would take awhile so used the slow hardener. Shop is warm, vacuum is working and West System epoxy is pretty reliable, so in the morning I should have a nice mess to clean up. Then the sanding can begin again. There will be some more glass work since I couldn't figure out how to add the Kevlar felt on the bottom like I wanted to. So once the bottom of the rudder is cleaned up and faired I will do another step to add that felt.