Switching gears ..... bulb ??

As you know I have already made a mold for the keel bulb which was one of my first posts. However I am going to wait to pour the final bulb until Trekka is in the water the sea trials are complete.

In the meantime, I have purchased a recycled keel from a scraped boat in our local yacht club yard. Now its time to get this thing into smaller more manageable pieces. I had a pretty good idea how to cut this up from previous experience and talking with some friends. But of course I had to look it up online. I'm sure there must be someone out there that must have done this before and posted it on Youtube.

Success !!

There were quite a few examples and I adopted some of their techniques and a few of my own.

We used 3 tools :

reciprocating saw

circular saw

power saw

They all cut the lead keel but with varying degrees of success .....

reciprocating saw ..... too slow and send your shoulder out of its socket occasionally

circular saw ...... cut really well and fast but we couldnt cut all the way through

power saw ( Husqvarna ) ...... this was the best of all of them ! we could cut all the way through and it was really fast. We saved all of the chips that came off of the few pieces that we cut off and it added up to about 20 kilos !! Here is the video of our cutting adventure

https://youtu.be/AW3b9_83eko

My plan now is to make a small test section for the bulb and pour that. Why am I doing this?

I want to cast the 3 counterbores and the holes through the bulb halves all at once during the pour. I have experience with this many years ago. As a Machinist, in the past we poured babbit bearings to replace worn out ones on the Great Lakes Freighters and at some of our local grain elevators. Although I havnt done them in a long time, I'm sure I can pick it up again - thus a test piece is in order !

The witch cauldron !