Thanks again everbody. Back for another update, real brief hopefully.... Once again I've been flying under the radar, keeping it stealth, and gettin er done! After I got the cattrack and the bottom rocker mold in the press, I ran into a few problems...
Used a two washers on the original cattrack design to spring load it:
But after a quick inflation.... FUUUUUU! The inside washers on all four corners were digging into the bladder. That shit was a NO GO, I could see them popping the hose open sooner or later...
The cattrack was also sitting on the edges of the tip/tail molds weird:
Once again, damn... I used a nico press sleeve to loop and tie off the cable ends on the cattrack, and these sleeves are pretty much permanent...
So to fix all this garbage going on up there I switched to a clamp to secure off the ends of my cables:
Waaay better, now I can freely add/remove links to the cattrack if I want to build a longer/shorter ski so it doesn't sit all weird on the tip/tail molds, and I was able to remove the washers during the process. Yay!
After that I got to work and cut some top mold spacers, cut my 2x6's to length to fill space up top, hung the molds with steel strip, and hung the cattrack with threaded rod and springs:
After that I was eager to pressurize it up with the molds in there for the first time:
I was worried about the top molds being ribbed and having gaps with the top hose touching it and all, but it held up just fine, didn't crack split or anything. The bottoms molds also stayed good. It also LOOKS like the cat track is conforming tightly to the tip/tail molds which is awesome. I guess we will see if the first pair delam there... Also glad to have a pretty tight press cavity, just over 1-1/2" with no cassette, camber/rocker shims, or ski materials in there yet. This is good!
After that I whipped out the lower jaw supports and let the jacks down:
...only to find out that my springs were weak sauce.
So tonight, I fixed that floppy dink of a thing with some bigger springs near the middle:
Looks way better, but its still not tight to the molds. I need more of these bigger springs, but the hardware store... I bought them out of both sizes. So I'll slowly replace my tinier weakling springs with the bigger style ones I bought, and then I may add bungee's and more threaded rod that will run between the springs down to the cattrack in a V pattern to pick up the slack there. A hybrid spring/bungee setup of sorts.
However I'm not too worried right now, with my moveable lower jaw, I have SOO MUCH SPACE to load cassettes into this thing, about 4-1/2" at the cattracks lowest point, if my skis are thicker than that, then damn, thats one hell of a ski....
Anyways, that wasn't short at all... But this press is pretty much done. My materials are on their way from Kam over at
http://www.skilab.com And I should be ordering epoxy from
http://www.entropyresins.com/ reaaally soon. But I can get to work on the the base, cores, and edges as soon as it arrives. WOO! Anyways, I gotta go sleep, mega tired!
