A Leg?!

Well, today begins a new leg in my great adventure!  I am sitting in a Starbucks in St. Petersburg, about to grab lunch then have a business meeting at 13:30.  My meeting is to prepare me for being the Costume Shop Manager for the next three months.  Also, I just checked out the mother-in-law/studio apartment that I just signed a lease on!  This will be the very first time I've had a place with walls all to my onesies.  I'm terribly excited to move in sometime in the next few days!  Also, on the weekends, I will be working the Bay Area Renaissance Festival.  This will all mean 55+ hour weeks, but jobs that I love!  Enough on the near future, how about a tail update?

the main house [not what I'm renting]

my little place!

We last left it with curvature tests and bending the tubing for the fluke.  I had decided to use gorilla glue because I've worked intimately with it in the past.  However, this was a mistake.  It held the tubing onto the monofin, but....  Firstly, gorilla glue dries stiff and inflexible.  Secondly, it does not seem to appreciate chlorinated water.

glued with gorilla glue

So, the tubing came right off when I took the fluke into the pool for some buoyancy tests.  Pretty sucky.  However, the buoyancy tests were a blast!  I took three ziploc bags of lead shot into the pool with me.  The most successful place to put them as I swam was in the dip of my lower back.  I was able to achieve near perfect neutral buoyancy!  IT WAS SO COOL!  Sorry, I was seriously excited about it!  I could swim up and down at will, and corkscrew, and swim sideways, etc!  Anyhow, I needed to find a new adhesive.  A mechanic friend suggested I try weatherstripping adhesive.  Nasty yellow snot stuff, that you really need gloves to work with.  So, the edges of the monofin were sanded [not quite as much as they should have been], and the tubing was glued back on.  I have two layers of the adhesive on currently and I did a chlorine test yesterday.  It seems to be holding up.  The plan is to add two more layers, then a layer of ALEX PLUS to make sure the ends are sealed off and for smoothing out bumps.  In the meantime, I have traced the fluke and will be perfecting the pattern and I can begin cementing the neoprene together.  It will be slow going with work and lots of things planned but I'm hopeful.

Look for a recipe for Orange Jiljush to appear in the next week....

nomtastic stuffs!