Cover letter

To whom it may concern,

 I am interested in applying for a Marine Cabinet Making position currently available at your business. I have recently completed a Certificate in Applied Technology: Boat Building, and also have a Certificate in Applied Technology: Furniture and Cabinet Making.

 I am young, confident, hard working and eager to apply my skills in a working environment. I work well in a team environment and also confident and capable working on my own. I have experience working with a wide range of machinery and how to be safe and mature whilst working with them. I am looking forward to expanding my knowledge in the marine cabinet industry.

Please contact me if you have any questions and I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

James Granger

Word Document

Using a word document to open and save, input and print is a easy thing to accomplish, i will run down in steps how to achieve this.

Step by step: Open and Save

1- To open a file you simply open Microsoft Word.
2- Pick on the "File" tool bar at the top of Microsoft Word.
3- Scroll down to open.
4- This will now bring up a box showing what is in the folder you are selected on.
5- find where the document you want to open is.
6- Double click it and you will have your file in Microsoft Word.

1- To save a document Pick on the "file" tool bar again.
2- Scroll down to "save"
3- A box will once again apare and you will be asked where you would like to place your file.
4- Choose where you want your file to be, name the file then click save.

Input file from the internet and printing

1- Open the page that you wish to copy to Word.
2- Highlight what you wish to copy by clicking the left button and holding down that button.
3- Still holding that buttomn move your mouse to where you want your copy to finish, all the words that you want to copy will now be highlighted in black.
4- Then right click the  highlighted area and a small box will apare.
5- scroll down and pick on "Copy".
6- Go back to your Word document and right click on a blank page.
7- Scroll down again and pick on "Paste" then you have transfered text from the internet to your Word document.

1- To print start of by again clicking on the "File" tool bar again.
2- Scroll down and pick on "Print"
3- Without changing any settings they computer will do the standard print and print what ever is on your Word document and print one copy of each page on Word.

File managing

There are many ways to manage important documents or files.  Im going to explain the purpose and benefits of using an external storage device to back up documents.

A USB drive is a external storage device that comes in many different sizes ranging from 512 megabytes to 16 gigabytes and getting bigger.  USB drives are good little tools to have, they store a whole load of data and they fit perfectly on your keys.  They simply work by grabbing your data file and transfering it over to the USB.

Step by step:

1- Inject your USB device.
2- Open the folder where the data file you want to put onto the USB drive is.
3- Right click the file you wish to transfer and scroll down to "Transfer to".
4- Pick on the USB device that will usualy say the brand name of the USB and which usb port it is into.
5- Wait for the transfer to complete.
6- To safely eject your device take your mouse to the bottem right of you screen then go to the icon that        represents that there is a external device plugged into your computer and double click, then click safely eject and your are safe to remove the device.  Doing this action will help prevent the loss or corruption of any transferred data.

For much larger storage unit you would be looking at a External Hard drive.  This is a more preferred option to use when dealing with larger files such as movies or large amounts of music.  The action is applied in the same way as with a USB drive when transferring data (as explained above).

Composite manual

This document is a manual of how to create a composite shape to a given set of plans.  The composite shape I'm going to discuss is the girder in the SHAW 550 yacht that we built in class.  The girder is and important structural member of the boat, it runs from the transom of the boat forward till you get near the cockpit.  The girder serves as a structural part of the cockpit floor so that when your walking along the deck the girder and support some of the load.

Steps:

1-  Make your composite product, don't force yourself to work within a boundry, try and keep it larger "you can always take off but not put back on"

2-  Create a working surface, larger than what you need.  Make it workable to standards of what you need.

3-  Gather and cut the materials that you need.  With the purfirated plastic you can cut that roughy to the size of the girder This will consist of resin, glass, purfirated plastic, mesh, vacuum bag and vacuum tape and have them by your table ready for it to be applyed.

4-  On your table that you have made to vacuum onto, put your vacuum tape around the edge, you would want to put the tape on before hand because that reduces the risk of the edge of the table to be contaminated like if resin goes to the edge of the the table and then you try and put down your tape it will not stick.

5-  Place your foam girder on the table and mix up 4-5 pumps of epoxy resin into a clean container and stir for 2 minutes and make sure that someone records the time that the resin was poured into the container becuase depending on the weather the resin has a pot life and will start to gel if not applyed fast enough.

6-  Lay your glass over the top of the foam girder and start wetting the resin out using squigies.  A good technique is to wet out the centre of your glass so that it can roughly stay in possition while your applying it to the other areas.

7-  Next you put your peel ply over the glass.
8-  Grab you purfirated plastic and lay it over the top of the girder but make sure it is kept within the boundries of the vacuum tape.

9-  Over the top of the purfirated plastic you want to put down your mesh still staying within the vacuum tape.

10-  Now for the vacuum bag, take you bag and work fown one side of your bag, while you are putting down your bag you need to put in some darts.  Darts are massive creases on the bag which helps the bag get around and into corners and tight spots.  You need quite a lot of these darts so dont be shy.

11-  Grab you hose and make sure it has mesh on and in the tip.

12-  While you are putting down the bag make a spot for you to put your hose into, the hose needs to fully sealed so cover it with vacuum tape and make sure it is pressed down onto the bag and the table with prenty of vacuum tape.

13-  Once you have finished putting down your bag and connecting the hose into the mix turn the hose on.

14-  Walk around the vacuum and listen for the whistle noises coming out of the bag which means there is an air hole that needs to be closed up so you can get a full vacuum.

15-  CLEAN UP.

The stack is made of different layers, each with different/similar perposes which are:

Glass- Glass is the external/internal skin  that helps stiffen up the boat in a massive way and protects the surface.

Peel Ply- Peel ply is a cloth that goes over the top of the glass and it soaks up excess resin and also heaps to protect the glass.

Purfirated Plastic- Purfirated plastic is oviously plastic but purfirated plastic has hole in it and this helps the let the air flow though and go out the bag to get a good vacuum.  This plastic also helps with excess resin.

Mesh- Mesh is like a shade sail type material that has larger hole in it and has the same purpose as the purfirated plastic, catching excess resin and heaps with the release of air.

Vaccum bag- Vacuum bag is a large plastic that is much bigger than the project you are doing.  You don't want any holes in the bag or else the bag becomes useless.

EDB240 - Fibre Glass                                                      Peel Ply

Purfirated Plastic                                                               Mesh

Vacuum Tape                                                                   Vacuum Bag

 Vacuuming the girder

Reflection: There were a few things that we can improve on and make better for next time, like when putting in the hose for vacuum you could put the hose at the top of a dart so the when the pump is turned on, the vacuum doesn't pull down the hose and create a bumo or hollow in the laminate.

Another thing we could have done was glassing both side at the same time, this would have been more efficient and saved more time.

Holiday!

I went on holiday cruise for a week so i missed out on a lot of the construction of the boat.  So when i came back everyone had been working on the deck and getting that all glassed up and putting it in the hot box for it to cook.  So when i got back the first thing i did was cut out the hatch for the cock pit and was dry fitting the deck to check the bulkheads that were in there.  Unfortunatly we had a fairly big problem with them but it is fixable but a problem none the less.  The next step was to cut the deck to size, bevel it and fit that into situe.

Gluing the deck down was the next step and we started it by applying the epoxy in the places where the deck would touch the flange, gerder flange, bulkhead and transom.  When the deck gets lowered down we need to hold down with preasure untill the glue sets so we made some tool that we can cramp the deck down using the frames.  After we put the deck down someone (ME) had to getting in the cockpit which is a very small area and then had to go down the side past the station 7 bulkhead and reach the station 11 bulkhead and clean off the excess glue that was in there, very very tricky job. 

On the wednesday we did some coving up forward and prepared for flipping the boat over.  When flipping it over we had to get some extra hands from upstairs and after we got it over the class went down to the bar and a drink as it is tradition to do so.

Refection

I dont have a lot of reflection to discuss about the collision bulkhead because i didnt see or have anything to do with it and the whole thing got knocked up in 2 days.

The first floor that was put down took quite a long time, the team was a bit unorganised and didnt quite cut things big enough and things had to get redone.  But by the time they went through and started doing the others they got faster, better and more efficient when applying the galss, now safe to say they will have no problems glassing any again.

The glass plate and carbon uni's were prity straight forward American Chris and I installed those with out too much problems.

The glassing of the rest of the deck was a very consentrated operation and was done very swiftly and carefull.  Not too much hassle.

Tutor Chris was the one that did the splash so i better not say that there was anything wrong with that one : P
"THATS A JOKE!!"

Hull, Deck, centre case and splash

Furhter developments on the hull consists of setting in the collision bulkhead, fitting the tube that goes in the bow of the boat, glassing of the floors and the centre case

The collisions bulkhead is a 8mm peice of foam that was made to the shape of the boat right up forward.  The bulkhead goes across the boat and serves 2 main purposes * giving strutural ingegrity to the boat, giving it more stiffness against the waves. Never good if your boat cant take the force of the waves :P  And the bulkhead also serves as structural part for the forward part of the deck to rest on.

There is a tube that goes up at the very very forward part of the boat, it goes through the collision bulkhead and through the nose cone of the bow.  This tube is just a case that holds in the prod which holds out the main sail (may need to check if that is corret)

The floors that i mentioned in my previous post has to be glass to keep it in place and add more stiffness.  Ultimately all the stiffness and strength in the boat comes from the glass thats laminated on so you would want all the parts of your boat to have glass on to get the maximum potentioal of strength of your boat.

The centre case in this boat is shaped like a trapezoid, it is made out of glass and goes right through the boat.  The perpose for a centre case is to hold the centre board which is a part of the keal.  This add balance to the yacht, unfortunatly i dont know too much on the subject so i cannot elaborate on the subject.

The deck has a few extra things to be done to it, theres the 2 mast plate peices, we will just say the "centre case plate" not sure what its really called and the carbon uni's and glassing the rest of the deck.

There were 2 types of mast plates that we put on the deck.  The first on is placed on the aft end of the blister.  This plate is a massive peice of glass made of several layers of glass and is prity heavy but is very strong and stiff.  This plate is about 120mm long and 80mm wide and half of the plate lays ont the blister and half of it hangs off, the reason for that is that the mast sits on top of this plate but the designer wants the centre of the mast to be on the centre of the bulkhead thats in there so therefore the centre of that plates centre is in line with the centre of the bulkhead.  The 2nd mast plate sit in the bulkhead at the very top of the but down the thickness of blister foam so it sits under and its aim is to take the massive load force that comes from the mast and spreads across the top of the bulkhead.

Carbon uni's is a fibre that only has the fibres going in 1 direction.  We put these carbon uni's diagonally down from the plate thats at the top of the bulkhead and runs down to the cockpit sole, there is another peice of carbon uni running across the the boat just above the cockpit sole.  These uni's serve as a load spreader, when load or preasure goes on the blister to the plate under it transfers to the carbon uni's then runs down, under the bulkhead on the deck it carries down underneath but in a mirror image to the top of part, those mirrored peices run down to the hull then the loads gets transfered down there also.

Glassing the rest of the deck deffinately seems like a harder task to do than what the aft part of the deck does because we have to glass the transition from the cockpit sole to the blister and the foredeck which does pose as a challenge but once we started to get it underway it wasnt so hard.  I think that is because we were deffinately more concentrated on what we were doing and learned from our mistake on the transom glassing but it did take a while.  A lot of darts were put into this bag because there is a tremendous amount of shape change in this boat but we got it done successfully.  On the deck we used the ADR resin which is a different type of resin we previously used and has a much longer pot life so we have more time to work with it.

A splash is something that takes the shape of a certain part of the boat so that when you turn the boat over you can place that splash on the ground and rest the boat on the top of it.  The splash is made out of several different meterials includeing double bias glass cloth and a few more things which i cant really remember (i will correct when i find out what they are)

Reflection

For glassing, by the time the team had got to the forward part of the boat they have developed a lot of skill, they could do a better job of the floors and got alot faster and more organised.

The gerder was done very well, they had a good vaccum, there was no spanning and there a good amount of resin on.  They learnt that where they put the hose was not the best spot for it to be.  They placed the hose which had mesh around it directly on top of the other mesh in the stack, this can cause a problem because once the vaccum is turned on there is so much preasure inside that bag that it will force the hose down and may create a dent/hollow in the laminate.  A much more effective way of placing the hose would be to create a dart and put the hose through the tip of that dart so when the vaccum is on it has no direct contact with the laminate.  The flange that was put on the gerder was next to perfect, what they did was they pre wet there glass out and layed it on there peel ply then grabbed a long metal straight edge and put some duraseal over the top so that the sglass doesnt get stuck to the straight edge, so they lay the straight edge down and put the glass over the top and turned the gerder over and placed it on top of the glass and coved it in.  This was a very good method of putting the flange on and i think it turned out perfect.  Thanks Chris.

On the blister which "Ugly Chris" and i were working on had made a mistake when we cut the top side and forward deck peice, we cut the foam but we cut to fit but what we hadnt taken into acount was that becase there was that blister we would hav to bevel the topside so that it can come in and we can plank the foam blister over the top of it.  But because we didnt allow for that we moade a bit more work for ourselves, to fix the problem we had make the first 2 strips lay inside on the top sides which was a harder task.

Ahh now vaccuming the deck, where do i start... we put down the glass on the forward part of the deck, completed that no problem.  Now the transom part and started on that and glassing that was ok, putting the vaccum bag down was the problem.  We put the vac tape down, put the bag over it, turn the vaccum on and watch, but, not a lot was happening, the vaccum was hardly working so we were going around trying to find where there was a hole that air was getting in.  Then "good looking Chris" went over to the transom and realised that there was resin on the vac tape and bag which wasnt sticking together.  After a couple minutes of playing around Chris desided to cut off a part of the transom and try and stick the vac tape to the temporary frame instead which didnt realy work either, not a good evening.  In the end after several attempts by Chris he desided to leave it and see how it was in the morning.  Later on we realised that there was a simple saw cut through the foam and that was the cause of not getting a vaccum.

Hull, Floors, Deck/blister and Vaccum

(A bit of a different layout this week and probably for the rest of my blog because i cant remember what we did on each day anymore : P)

At this point we really split ourselves up and worked on diffierent parts of the boat.  From memory there were 2 hull teams, 1 was finishing the very foward part of the hull and getting that all glassed up and then there was the team that worked on the floors.  Floors are laminated pieces of foam put together going athwartships (port to starboard) in certain parts of the boat.  Doing this creates structural integrity to the hull of the boat so that nothing happens to the boat when it crashes in to the waves.

The other group that was working on the hull were completing the for and aft gerder which goes from the transom to the station 7 bulkhead and goes from the top side of the hull to the underside of the cockpit sole.  The reason we have the gerder is to stiffness to the deck and hull and also that when you walk over the deck/cockpit sole so you dont go through.  The gerder has a flange on the top of it, a flange is a flat peice of glass which layes paralell to the gerder and is dead flat.

This pink foam is the gerder which has the flange over the top.

The deck team which is the team i was apart of, we worked on getting the cockpit sides, topsides and the blister.

The blister is big bubble type roof for the cockpit.  The blister has to be made out of strips of foam and it follows the shape of the deck so the aft end of the blister is larger than the forward end which means that the strips of the blister has to be tapered to fit.  The blister also has a dome sort of shape so not only do the strips have to be tapered for and aft it also has to be beveled on the sides so that there are no gaps when they come together.

The sides are roughly cut oversized and gluing them up to make the length that we need.  The next step was getting cutting the cockpit sides and top side and fairing them to fit.  The topside has a extra 50mm round gthe whole deck.  The reason for that is for he vaccum.  In more datail the vaccumm has to have something to stick down to and if we put it on the edge of the finished measurement of the boat then we cant glass it all the way to the edge, we would end up having the glass too short, so chris designed the temporary frames to have that 50mm lap because he knew that we would need something to put the vaccum onto.

The way that the vaccum works is first of all if you want to vaccum a glassed surface you need to prepare the stack.  The stack consists of and in this order, the surface your going to glass with the glass over the top - the peel ply - perfirated plastic - mesh - and finally the vaccum bag.  The vaccum bag is stuck down to the surface (in this case it is the deck) around the deck with what we call vaccum tape or as chris says (gorilla snot) and you stick the bag to the tape and the tape is fairly stick but when the vaccum is turned on.. it STICKS! very sticky stuff when you have a complete vaccum.  On the vaccum bag you need to create these things called "darts" darts are parts of the vaccum bag where we have created a sort of kink in the bag so that when the bag has its vaccum that the bag dosnt "span" over areas that arnt flat.  Spanning is where the bag isnt pulling down onto the surface, typically they happen in corners, if you can imagine the deck of the boat where the bottem of the deck and the side deck they make a sort of right angle and the bag running over the bottem and the side, in the corner if that right angle is a corner that the bag needs to get right into or else the bag will not pull dow the glass onto the surface of that corner, if the bag isnt quite in that corner, that is called a "span".

Parts of the "Stack"

Peel Ply - The peel ply act as a type of backstop for the excess resin, the peel ply will soak up that excess resin and hold it in the peel ply.  The peel ply also will stay on in the part that you dont need to work on untill you have finished the boat, the peel ply will protect the glass from being contaminated in anyway or scratched.

Perfirated Plastic - The perfirated plastic also acts as a backstop for excess resin and has small holes in the plastic to also any more excess resin to go through and also anyair that is under the plastic.

Mesh - The mesh acts as the final backstop for the resin but mostly its job is to release the air through.  After the mesh is the bag and the next day you have a vaccumed galss surface.

Week 6

Monday- Applied another layer of glass on the forward part of the hull which the team had some trouble with applying because of the rapid shape change of the hull.  Definatelty a bit tougher than the last 3.  Cut and glued together the cockpit sole oversized.

Tuesday- Todays main objectives were to get the cocpit sole fit to size and beveled to the right shape and to get the gerder vaccumed.

Wednesday- Today we had to determain where the bulkheads are and where the transom will come up to by putting the steal straight edges on the top of the hull on the forward side of the frames and further forward more to allow for the thickness of the transom and two sides of resin and glass. also that day we had to get the cockpit sole glassed up on one side because the foam that we used has holes in it. The reason we had to glass one side before hand is because of the holes in the foam, if we do not have one side already glassed or covered we would not be able to get a vaccum.

Week Five

Monday- We sealed the hull of the boat with an epoxy seal and started working on the nose cone.

Tuesday- De-nibbed and made fair/smooth and glued up the nose cone.

Wednesday- Layed out 3 sheets of glass and applyed the peelply over the top and had to remake the nose cone for it was not up to the quality that we can achieve.

Chris and Jade came in on Thursday and put in a cove on the chine and installed the nose cone.

Week Four

Monday- We ALMOST got all the planking done! just no quite finished. And the deck building base was being made.

Tuesday- Sanded what we had layed down and at the end of the day we fitted in the last of the planks.

Wednesday- More sanding.... not very fun. Got up some more frames and filled some holes.

"not very fun"

unless you have one of

< Those

Week Three

Monday- We installed some more planks at the aft end to fill the last little gap that we had.

Tuesday- Sanded the area that we had already glue up and got that nice and smooth.

Wednesday- We were only able to get one more plank in between the several blank in the centre and the chine plank.

Week two

On Monday we got some striped planking and placed in situe the chine plank and made the next plank going port and starboard of the 2 center planks.

Tuesday we have placed down 2 more in between the port and starboard planks we places yesterday and we are currently taking off the chine plank to create some ripping into the plank to reduse the tension on the plank and make it easier to curve and twist the plank.

Wednesday the team completed some more strip planking and clued in situe.

Week one Setting up shaw 5.5

Hi

Last week we started on the setting up process to build the Shaw 5.5 by drawing the grid onto the floor.
Tuesday we contuinued on the floor and built the garboard and the building block.

On Wednesday we installed all of the frames and also layed out and glue the 2 center planks and made sure that the 2 planks formed a centerline that we can work from.