02 Jun 08

Hunt and I reworked the crank on the take-up mechanism this morning. Hunt welded a socket to the spindle, and we are using a 3/4" ratchet to turn it. I cut some steel to make a bracket for the pawl, and Hunt welded it in place. This setup should hold up a lot better. Zac showed up, and Caroline and Ben were ready to weave. Hunt, Luke and I worked in the blue room on finding a reed, assembling the heddles, locating some rotary cutting blades, and thinking about the seat weave. After lunch, Caroline, Ben, and Kendal wove. Zac went to the Home Depot to pick up some OSB, and and Luke assembled a heddle. I worked on getting the box channel caps glued on. Since gluing these pieces on means limiting access to a large part of the chassis, we are going to have to prepare this part of the chassis before we glue it on. I had a lot of old fasteners to remove, plus I still had to drill the 5th hole in the upper trailing arm mounts on the S-panel. When I finished all this grunt work, I glued an angle bracket on the passenger's side that will help locate and reinforce the box channel cap on the front edge. I went to check on Ben, and found him weaving with Hunt at about 8pm. They were just finishing up 3 feet of weave in 1.5hours of weaving time. We got about 12feet of weave today, which is impressive. Our new tensioning system is working really well. After dinner, I came back out to glue the same bracket on the driver's side, and I began to sand off glue drips and finger smudges in preparation of spraying clear inside the box channel, finishing up at 11:00pm. Our cherry stain should come in tomorrow, so we hope to treat the weave for the butterfly panels and glue it on soon. I have to sand the butterfly panel surfaces first, though, which should be a blast.