andrewlucking.com

Just writing that title made me cringe ;-)

I thought I’d try the notched spreader fairing technique to try evening out those newbie splices I was mentioning last week. This should allow me to (more) quickly build up either side of the high spot.

For anyone not familiar with this technique, the idea is to apply a layer of fairing material with a notched spreader or trowel. The ridges are then sanded fair and filled in with another coating of fairing material. While not the most sparing way to apply Quickfair I think it’s going to save me the painstaking process of building layer upon layer.

I was inspired to try out this technique after reading a recent post from Ed on his Building the F-22 blog. Thanks Ed!

Here’s a couple shots taken after sanding the ridges down:

Overall, the fairing seems to be coming along. There are sections, such as aft of the ridges, that are starting to look almost even. Depending through which window the sun is shining into the hayloft.

(No, I’m not flipping the bird in that first photo - it’s cell phone shadow).

Fairing has progressed in fits and starts over the past three or four weeks.

After spending a long day hand sanding with the long board I ran out and ordered a pneumatic long board sander. This thing is absolutely my new favourite tool (fuzzy photo warning):

The downside to airtool sanders is that they require a heavy duty compressor to run them. I spent a frustrating day blowing fuses in the barn with a rented electric powered compressor. It ran fine provided the air tank was empty when the motor started. Once it was filled and then partially depleted by the sander the compressor motor would kick in and the amperage it drew in order to push air into the pressurized tank was too much for the barn’s electrical system.

My next attempt was with a gas powered compressor. I set it up on the lawn outside the barn and ran the hose through the hayloft window. Damned if it didn’t work a charm. It certainly isn’t as quiet as sanding by hand but it sure is efficient.

I have some serious high spots on the hull that are going to require a bit of extra fairing attention. These spots correspond to where the side panels were spliced oh so long ago and are a definite result of my having no experience in working with epoxy and fibreglass. I like to think that I’ve progressed as a boat build since those first splices were layed up. You can see a couple of those areas in the foreground of the photo below. Just look for the Quickfair ;-)

Maybe its because I have a new toy but I’m almost looking forward to using the airtool again.

It isn’t a heck of a lot but I’ve heard from a few folks asking for pointers on how to get setup to try building RMD on the Mac.

Last night after I’d finished typing up an email response to one such request I flipped over to Bloglines and ran across Jeff Atwood’s reminder of a great post from Jon Udell. Both Jon and Jeff make the point that blogging something like say, a collection of pointers for building a binary XPCOM on the Mac is much more useful to more people than sending it off in an email or two. Unfortunately, they didn’t email me those thoughts so I almost didn’t realize they were talking to me ;-)

Like I said, it’s not much but hopefully this will help to get you started if you’d like to contribute the Mac version of the XPCOM component to RMD. And if I’ve said something that is not correct or you have any more insight on the topic, we’ll all benefit if you’d like to share it…

One of the first things you’ll need in order to build the XPCOM component fro RMD is the Gecko SDK for your platform. For an Intel Mac you’d need to build XULRunner in order to get the SDK. There is what appears to be a good set of build docs (including a build requirements section).

[Update 2007-05-20]: A couple of people have pointed out that Dave Townsend is hosting an “unofficial” Intel SDK build (thank you Dave!). That’s one less step.

For PPC you should be able to skip that step and grab the “official” Mozilla Gecko SDK.

Once you have the SDK for your platform I’d guess you really only need XCode on the Mac (I’m really Mac illiterate but I think this is a part OSX so you shouldn’t need to install any additional packages) . If you download my component’s source you’ll find a Linux make file that should be a good starting point for the Mac build.

If you use the Linux Makefile included as a starting point and you get link errrors that look something like “ld: -L: directory name missing” try removing the space in the LD flags:
-GECKO_LDFLAGS = -L $(GECKO_SDK_PATH)/lib \
+GECKO_LDFLAGS = -L$(GECKO_SDK_PATH)/lib \

FWIW, Mozilla have a pretty good tutorial for building C++ XPCOM using Visual Studio on Windows.

Good luck!