On Saturday I was ready to do the final bit of glassing on the hull - the inside. I just finished sheathing the outside of the hull on Thursday with 1.5 layers of cloth and 3 coats of epoxy.
Friday night was actually a pretty slow night. A friend showed up with a bottle of Gibson's 12 Yr old whiskey - om nom nom!!. We put a very fine dent in the bottle before 10:30 when he went home. Not wanting to miss an entire night of building, I decided to pull the stations out of the hull and complete the filleting of the keel and chines. A very short job and no pictures either.
Saturday was my son's basketball tournament. This was an all day affair so I was not able to do anything with the boat until after supper. I tackled the next task on the list - putting one layer of glass and two coats of epoxy on the inside. The glass and first coat were done in a couple of hours on Saturday night. I put the final coat of epoxy on at noon on Sunday. As often, I never bother to take the camera out during the process - don't want to get expoy all over it - so I only have a shot of the finished product.
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| Inside completed. Note the "alternate " location of the boat at this time. (See reason below) |
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| Shiny!! |
The next big thing to do with the hull is sanding but I'm holding off on that for a while. I want to get started on the deck. The deck is made of 4 separate panels that are glued together to make a one piece deck. Sunday night's goal was the gluing up of the panels. Again, I used glass butt joins (no scarfs or plywood backing plates). It all went rather smoothly. I only have a picture of the whole affair as it was after setup. Note that I needed the full table so the boat was relegated off to the wings!
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| Joining up the deck panels. |
I used the weights to hold the joins during the gluing up. Two sets as there are two joins in the deck. On the edge of the table you can see my batten. I had to reglue it as the original join broke during some rough handling!
Next step is lofting the lines onto the plywood and cutting the deck. I can't wait to see this thing sitting on top of the hull. Fingers crossed that my hatches arrive today!!
I'm surprised you didn't use scarf joints. How do the joining techniques rate for strength?
ReplyDeleteTony :-)
Scarfs are not easy to do properly and in this case, the strength comes afterwards when you sheath the entire hull (joins and all) on BOTH sides with 6oz cloth and epoxy. The joining of the panels really only needs to be strong enough to hold them while you fit them together to actually make the hull/deck shape. I thought I was going to have to do either scarfs or plywood back butt joins until I did some reading/researching.
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