Hull Stripping and Attempted Staining

Stripping was relatively easy and very quick. The wood reminded me of making balsa wood models when I was a kid:)

Main points were:

• Make sure strips are even thickness – if I do this again I’ll invest in a planner thicknesser.

• I mostly just stapled strips only occasionally using a bead of glue – this had one advantage – towards the end as I looked at the forms and the shape of the hull I realised I had one form on  slightly wrong angle – not sure how this happened as I was sure I had it right at the beginning. Nevermind, I unscrewed it and re-adjusted just a tiny bit and suddenly it looked great.
• I thought I’d stain the strips before using epoxy to glue them all thogether – unfortunately, Resene interior stain turns out to not be as epoxy compatible as the Resene staff thought it would be. It beaded a bit but wasn’t irrecoverable – I might even put more stain on after I rub it all back in preparation for fibreglassing – but if I do I’ll wash with acetone and use a much thinner application of stain. Check the image below…

 

Hull looks great but I can’t get a good photo showing it the way I see it in real life. Perhaps for the next posting…

Spatial Notes–Getting Started

Thought this would be harder than it turned out to be.

Objective: chart some metrics across geographic regions (in my case looking at customer metrics over New Zealand).

To get started I took advantage of SQL Server Spatial. Initially appearances are a  bit daunting until you try it… and it’s fairly easy.

• Finding the GIS data
  • for NZ  Statistics NZ publish digital boundaries – versioned by publication year (2007, 2001, 1996 etc: http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/geographic-areas/download-digital-boundaries.aspx
  • The data is available in both ESRI Shapefile format and MapInfo format. You can use shape2sql to load this data into sql server spatial. Unfortunately… it has a bug, it won’t create a table from the shp file inside shape2sql – I had to use SQL Profiler to capture the create table instruction and run it interactively – after that the data load works fine - not sure why.
  • The data has a hierarchy of increasingly larger geometrical areas made up of units of the smallest size (the meshblock). There’s Area Units, Urban Areas, Regional Councils etc.
    
• Connecting people to areas
  • Either pay for the GeoPAF file from NZ Post – this gives the meshblock for a delivery address and a NZ Map Grid coordinate. (Not so useful NZ Post… NZMG has been superceeded by NZTM which conforms with WGS84.)
  • Or, use the freely obtainable streetlink data from Stats NZ:  http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/geographic-areas/streetlink.aspx
• Aggregating
  • Use SQL Server Analysis Services, or much faster
  • Use PowerPivot – for me this allowed me to very quickly aggregate customer metrics from an internal database across areas loaded from the Stats NZ files
• Reporting
  • It’d be nice if Excel had spatial reporting support, but it doesn’t – big thumbs down Microsoft…
  • I used SQL Server Reporting Services and the Map control. Problem is that I need to have the map data in SQL/SSAS. It’d be nice to load from PowerPivot but I can’t do that unless I store the Excel PowerPivot doc in Sharepoint 2010. Jumping through hoops to do this though… Microsoft – just get the spatial support into Excel please!

Strip cutting

I followed Bjorn’s instructions and cut the strips with a circular saw. The planks were pinned to a folding stand at each end. The paulownia was extremely stable. It didn’t split when I pinned it at the edge of the plank. Not one of the strips split or snapped. In the end it was much easier than I expected. Suspect it would’ve been even easier if I had a decent saw…

Ebonizing Paulownia

Vinegar and steel wool, left for a few days, filtered and then applied to paulownia strip – thinking of using this on my kayak. Top of the strip has been painted twice.