Author: Paul Tomblin

What a scorcher!

This office has never been particularly well airconditioned. Mostly it’s too hot in both winter and summer, although a few years ago it was the opposite, so that I kept a sweater in my desk for the days when it was too over airconditioned in the summer. But in the last couple of years, we keep getting “emergency power reduction program in effect”, which means that they’ve turned off at least one of the building’s chillers, usually because one of the (formerly belonging to the company, now sold off to some other organization) power generators is off-line.

Today it’s bloody hot in the office, and of course this is a day when I chose to wear a long sleeve shirt.

Kayak Construction, beveling the shear line

I had to work this weekend, which means I didn’t get to spend much time working on my kit, nor did I manage to get out kayaking. Although the weather was mostly shit, so I probably wouldn’t have managed more than a quick dash if I could have gone. Worse, I missed an opportunity to meet up with a couple of people who’ve built a Pygmy Boats kit similar to mine.

The next tasks on my list were to bevel the cockpit reinforcements so that they won’t clash with each other when the pieces go together at an angle, and to bevel the shear line so that when the deck and the hull are put together, they join at the outer ply only. The instructions are a little vague but they suggest that you can do this using a wood rasp, sanding block or block plane. I happened to have a palm sander, and I like a bit of power when I’m going to be removing wood. By holding the sander at approximately a 45 degree angle, and sanding until I saw the glue line between the first and second ply move back to just the right amount behind the sheer line, then I knew I was just biting into the third ply.

I got half the sheer lines done (the side on panel 3) before my hands got so numb I couldn’t continue.

Kayak Construction, gluing the cockpit reinforcement

After a couple of days of it being too cold to glue, yesterday I glued the 4 pieces of cockpit reinforcement that I cut on Tuesday. The instructions said to mix in some wood flour into the epoxy to make it “the consistency of honey”, which is odd because I think of normal epoxy as being about that consistency normally. It also didn’t say how much to mix up, so I did one squirt of resin (1 ounce) and hardener (1/2 ounce).

Before I mixed in the flour, I used some of the epoxy to fix one of the joins where the cloth actually came up off the wood – I crammed in the epoxy with the stir stick and then put the mylar sheet on top and several brick on top. I wasn’t expecting perfection, but I’m hoping it will be less obvious that it was before.

The gluing went ok, but I nearly ran out of epoxy at the end. The first one had lots of epoxy running out the side when I put the bricks on, and the last had absolutely none.

This evening I checked on it and took off the bricks. The join fix came out about as well as I’d hoped – it sticks up a bit and it’s obvious if you look, but I think it won’t be horribly obvious to bystanders. I’m hoping it will be less obvious when it comes time to glass the whole thing. (But if you want to embarrass me, it should be on the left side of the deck very near the stern)

The reinforcement plates had the usual sorts of problems. One of them stuck to the table where the spillage missed the plastic I’d put under it, and I had to scrape off the stuck on table wood with the cabinet scraper. Another one had some scmutz from the brick stuck to the top, and I scraped that off as well. But the one where I’d used up the last of the epoxy seems to be stuck on good and tight, so no worries there.

D’oh!

One of the trials and tribulations and also one of the fun challenges of my job is that I get vague bug reports on something the QA person sees sometimes and not others. Our QA people don’t do a very good job of tracking exactly what they did and what they did differently between the ones that work and the ones that don’t. Ok, sometimes that’s our fault as developers for not logging enough, but it would be nice if they could tell you, for example, that the one that didn’t work used to be on the schedule before it was removed from the schedule while the one that does work has never appeared on the schedule.
Continue reading “D’oh!”

Java Exceptions

I swear, the next person I discovered declaring a method as “throws Exception” is going to get a kick in the balls. Serously, what sort of fucked up code are you writing that you can’t even tell what type of exceptions it’s going to throw? It’s head up your ass lazyness, pure and simple. And it poisons the code all up the line because your callers have to do the same, and then their callers, all the way up to whoever is handling the exceptions.