Well holy cow guys. Turns out trying to graduate college, taking care of a puppy, planning a wedding, planning a move to Michigan, finding a house in Michigan, and jumping through all the hoops to get hired at the job that pays for all of this takes up all of my time!
So! After my long hiatus I finally put a little more work in this weekend and am finally making some great progress. Last time I updated I had just cut out my footholds, well I got a great deal farther, so let's get into it.
First thing I did was take a trip to home depot as I was unsatisfied with using the Dremel. I was burning through both bits made to side cut fiberglass and those little disks made for fiberglass, and that was just for those two little footholds! I did some research and found a couple guys using a Dremel oscillating tool. So I tried it. Wow... I used a heavy duty multipurpose half circular saw bit with it and it is the cleanest, fastest, thinnest line I could have asked for. Cut through my tray like butter and took half the time as one foothold.
After I got the tray out (which cut my hand up quite a bit..worth it) it was time to defoam. I used a mixture of screwdrivers, wire brush on a power drill, and some pent up anger/rage to get all of the foam out. At the beginning of defoaming I was a little nervous that it was going to be unnecessary, but once I got halfway down I found quite a bit of water soaked in and sitting around...whew.
After all the foam was out I did a lot of research about putting in trim/one way valve/all sorts of other stuff, but ended up deciding I would never actually put in trim. For drainage I'll just add another pump vs a one way valve since lots of people have lots of problems with skis ending up quite moist. Therefore it was time to work on the big pink jigsaw puzzle that is reforming.
Using 2" pink home depot foam I worked from left to right getting as tight and full fit as possible. It wasn't the prettiest I've ever seen here, but I'm pretty satisfied. Over all, just taking the old stuff out and putting the new stuff in dropped my ski weight ~30lbs. Not too shabby.
Finally I got the tray fitted vertically by adjusting the height of the foam. Then mixed up some epoxy with cabosil to a peanut butter consistency and glued her in! I had to use a car jack to keep the little "wings" in the front pushed back where they are supposed to be. I checked on her this morning and she is nice and glued in, almost completely flush!
My next step hopefully tonight will be to epoxy glue the footwells in, then Wednesday fiberglass it all in!
Sorry about the long hiatus, hopefully there are still people out there that want to hear about this! Hopefully it will help some first timer in the future!
Pax Vobiscum,
Jacob Stucky
