Recent content by Miss Gradenko

I think that's well summarized, Sophie. Our aim is to get the vacuum down to 28 inches or more. Then the boiling point will be 100oF or less. Our guess (we forgot to bring our meat/hull thermometers) was that we heated the small part of the hull to maybe 120oF or so, such that it boiled at 27...

Yes, Sophie, we're also concerned about heating the hull too much. We want to dewater the sandwich, not delaminate it. That's why we're going to try a larger diameter vacuum hose (1/2", instead of 1/4"), in the hope of countering the backflow with increased outflow. If it works, we should be...

Cleonis wrote: "You can lower the ambient pressure but I think evaporation rate will stay pretty much the same, until you reach the boiling point, where there'll be a sudden increase." So our Plan B - bagging the hull and trying to increase the evaporation rate through decreased ambient...

@Sophie chuckling again...yes you might think we should just cover the boats, but those covers are expensive (the club has 18 Albacores), and a nuisance when the boats get used so much...and because the mast is up we'd need the type of cover that passes around it, which doesn't (in my...

Thanks, Cleonis. I grasp the seeming paradox, but if nature abhors a vacuum then won't the water evaporate more quickly to fill that vacuum? Put simply, if the inner hull surface temp is 16oC and the air pressure is lowered by 20%, to 24 inches, will that pressure change materially accelerate...

OK, there's a lot to cover. Please bear with me, and thanks again for your help. Hot Vac: Yup, Sophie, our Plan A is to try to achieve the poor man's Hot Vac. Apply a deep vacuum to a portion of the hull, heat it up and flash off the water. But if our inline cold trap isn't efficient then...

Man, you guys rock. I wake up and find my thread flooded like I posted a Trig Birther rant. Thanks for that. I have comments on all of the above, including a survey of various techniques we've tried in past years, but got to run for now. I hope you'll check back after I post so we can get to...

Re edit #1: Wouldn't the dessicant be on the exhaust side? Oh wait, I see what you're saying. I guess it amounts to "be sure to blow dry air through the hull". Re edit #2: No, I just use the boats, owned by our club, for the grand cost of $400 per year. (FYI, we attract lots of...

Thanks, Danger. That's a good suggestion, and those are fair questions. Dessicant: I looked at using a dessicant canister but concluded that if we're trying to remove maybe 5-10 gallons of water it would be impractical to do it one pint (or so) at a time. I assume there's no such thing as a...

Picture a 15' sailboat with a hull made of a sandwich (from the outside in) of gelcoat (relatively impermeable), resin-impregnated fiberglass, stiff closed-cell foam, then more resin-impregnated fiberglass (which you see looking into the boat). The foam is not one piece, but a grid of 2" x 4"...