Although my shop is essentially complete, there’s always a bit of messing about to do when starting a new project. We spent the first part of the day setting up a roughly 15 by 6.5 foot cutting table. My cutting tables consists of modular table units. Each unit is a 30″x80″ hollow core door as the tabletop on top of a set of folding legs (purchased from the ever-so-useful McMaster-Carr Company — www.mcmaster.com) I can put spacing blocks between the tables to get a more precise size. Then I put down a layer of 1/8″ masonite to make a nice even work surface.
We then unrolled some fabric (It’s “ground cover” green.) and had great fun destroying bits of it on a pair purpose built fabric testers that I have. The fabric tested out with a tensile strength of around 40 lbs/inch. The tear strength is beween 5 and 6 lbs. This is quite adequate, particularly for the bottom part of the balloon.
Kevin (with some help from your humble author) then cut out the first two set of trapezoids for the bottom of the balloon.
In the evening, Kevin practiced sewing “French seams”. He’d done a fair bit of it last year when putting together a model balloon. But the fabric for this project is much lighter weight than the material on the model.
Kevin is not using a seam folder. I don’t have one (It didn’t make sense for the complicated seams on my blimp.) We’ve also heard very mixed things about the effectiveness of folders. Some folks swear by them as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Others tell tales of woe about spending seemingly endless amounts of time fiddling with the folders and never getting them set up right — in particular when using a folder on lightweight fabric.