It was a soggy day here in Portland. Finally in the afternoon there was a dry break and I was antsy to make more progress. I set out to remove the plywood base for the raise platform for the NAFTA James Cook. Judging from the surface area I knew I cannot remove it with brute force. It is built like the Bismarck. To defeat it I have to resort to the British admiralty's approach. Divide and conquer with death by thousand cuts.
The bathroom is a very tight place for this fight. I figured if I use a circular saw set to the right cutting depth I can cut it into a number of narrow strips and then break up a strip at a time using the adjacent one as leverage. It is very hard to operate a circular saw safely in such confined space but fortunately I have
Barbie's physique.
there is just enough space to use my milwaukie sidewinder saw to start with a plunge cut
The cutting created a lot of dust. I turn on my Fein vacuum cleaner to suck out the dust during the cut but still there was dust everywhere. Fortunately not much landed into the cabin.
i sequentially ply out the strips starting from the outside row; you can see the pile of strips removed; i actually didn't need the hammer
it turned out i was right; the plywood stack was glued down with latex silicon caulking that must have been a thousand pounds of adhesion; the fein multimaster fitted with the scrapper blade make the job a snap; doing it manually would take a lot of elbow grease and sweat
If I didn't use the Multimaster removing the caulking with a putty knief would take a few hours and also scratch up the surface. It is an incredible tool and using it is a pleasure. Using it to clean off the tenacious silicon latex caulking was as easy as using a electric shear to cut hair.
all the latex silicon caulking removed in short order using the multimaster
i test fit the toilet and shower pan to check the fitment
you can see the tight tolerance of the bathroom construction - just the right size gap all around for caulking or using the optional gasket seal
i have to maintain very tight tolerance on the shower pan's new dam as the retaining clips for the valance cannot accommodate any inaccuracy
here you can see the three layers of plywood, each has about 12 plys- plywood does not get better than this
No comments:
Post a Comment