Aft bunktop and extra cockpit deck foam completed

Nothing big to report this week (i.e., cockpit seats aren't glued in yet) but I did get several small items done.

The rest of the B glass behind the main cabin hatch flange is done. I must say, that having this flange finished has totally changed, for the better, the ease of entry into the main cabin. Even as big as I am, now I can swing myself into the main cabin with ease, and not worry about hurting anything. I can stand on the bottom flange and it's just rock-solid, making it a nice staging point for getting around.

The main cabin hatch gussets have been laminated over.

All of the pre-formed cockpit tape flanges are finished. I need to make a decision soon on whether I'm going to paint-out the interior of these compartments before glueing the seats on. I am leaning that direction though.

Tip: I find the pre-formed tape flanges to be quite flexible after removing the mold. To stiffen them up, the very next day I coat the glueing surface of the tapes with a thin layer of bog. Then when I sand it later, I'm sanding the bog and not the glass, which makes it easy to get a nice rough surface. There's probably a tiny weight penalty with this approach, but better that than a poor bond between the flanges and the cockpit seat (esp the beam bulkhead flanges).

The edges of the cockpit compartment hatches, and the aft-cabin hatch, have been dug-out and filled with bog.

I got tired of looking at the missing second half of the aft-cabin bunktop, and so it has been glued in-place:

...and taped:

I think this was the first time I've ever been in the aft-cabin with the boat in the upright position...there is LOTS of room back there. Makes me glad I'm building this model.

I glued in the the second layer of foam for the cockpit deck out of smaller scraps, using pieces of wood to hold them down:

Dry-fitting\trimming the A glass over the new foam layer:

And then in the middle of laminating:

Things are moving right along.

Take me out to the ballgame

I'm not that much of a baseball fan, but my wife and I do like to go see a Seattle Mariners game once or twice a year. Today we watched them play the Texas Rangers - yay, we won; 5-3!

This was at the beginning of the fifth inning (if you don't believe me, you can check the scoreboard :):

I try to get reasonably good seats since we so rarely go to these games; today's seats were great, we were in row 31 and nearly behind home plate as you can see. Makes foul-ball action quite exciting; I was never close enough to get a hand on one, but one did whiz by only 5'-6' over my head.

The baseball stadium in Seattle has a neat feature in that its roof is retractable. You can read more about it at Wikipedia; today was the first time we've been there that they've closed the roof during the game; it was cool to watch. Contrast the picture above, with the following picture which has the roof almost closed:

The roof only takes ten minutes to close (not air-tight, it's designed more like a giant umbrella), which is nice when the rain starts to come down.

Lastly: while it's fun to watch a baseball game occasionally, I was telling my wife we should start going to some minor-league games again. For example, the Everett Aquasox (single-A affiliate of the Mariners); we've been to a couple of their games and the action is just so much more "in your face": instead of thirty rows back, you're less than ten rows back and MUCH closer to the field. Also, the minor league players, at least in the games I've been too, really give it 110% effort. You do see more mistakes being made, but that just makes things more exciting. And Everett (about 30 minutes north of Seattle) is far easier to drive to than downtown Seattle.

Weekend update

It was a short work day today on the boat, but I made some progress. The cabin flange has been trimmed up, and the under-side B glass (two layers) has been done on the bottom portion of the flange:

The main cabin hatch coamings are all laminated:

The warm weather was very helpful in getting the glass to cure quickly around those tight curves. ("Warm" is relative of course; personally, I start to melt over 90 deg F or so... :). I have not yet laminated or filled the foam edge of the gusset; will be soon now that the coamings are done.

And some more progress on the cockpit seat flanges:

See how some of the tape edges are nicely trimmed and squared up? I discovered that a Fein Multimaster tool (borrowed from my neighbor Bill - thanks!) does a spectacular job of easily trimming these up. I also used it to trim the cabin flange back. If I had known about it, it would have also done a great job trimming the beam mount LFS flanges. This tool is going on my Christmas list for sure.

It's not shown in any pictures, but I also added a second layer of C glass to the doubler plates on all beam mounts. The original plans only specified one layer, so that's what I did (a few weeks back). I was breezing through the last plan update (May 2009) thinking that I could probably ignore everything in that update since it's primarily focused on the new style beam mounts; then I noticed the new beam mount sheets call for TWO layers of C glass over the doubler plates...so I added the extra layer, just to be on the safe side.

Main cabin flange

The plans call for a heavily reinforced flange around the main-cabin entrance\hatch. I made up mold plates yesterday and then installed them this morning:

The straight blue lines are a reminder to me to overlap the glass at least that far, so I have enough to trim later on. Here's a view from above:

I laminated the bottom first (doing bottom and sides at the same time is left as an exercise for the adventurous reader):

With sides in place:

Side view after removing the mold plates:

All of this work was aided by the fact that we've been having a very warm weekend (high 80's deg F), so I got nice fast cures. Even so, I didn't watch the bottom laminate close enough and it cured into a slightly curved shape, instead of a flat flange with rounded edges. Ah well, could have been worse.

Here's how it looks from outside:

It would have been better to do this big flange before the cockpit seat fronts, but it worked out okay.

Finally, it's been a long couple of days in the sauna-tent, but I'm feeling good about my progress lately:

Tomorrow, I'll trim the flange and laminate the B glass on the other side.

More cockpit work

I've decided to move ahead with the cockpit compartment plan in my last post. Here's one of the new bulkheads in place:

You can also see where I drew a line around the bottom edge of the cockpit seat, so I'd have a guideline for constructing pre-formed tapes if necessary - which it will be for the two aftmost compartments, unfortunately.

Safety compartment bulkhead set in place, along with both hatch holes cut:

Cutting the exterior hatch hole in the picture above made me a bit nervous, but I think it will look okay:

I moved the placement of the safety compartment from port (where it was in my plan, last post) to starboard after very careful consideration. Namely: I'll normally be towing the boat in the right-hand lane most of the time, and with the safety compartment on the starboard side passing drivers won't be able to see it. :)

Here I'm working out the placement of the hatch for the semi-dry compartment, and the access hole for the wet compartment:

One of the hatches set in place:

And voila, all the holes are cut:

There's no real guidance in the plans for how far away from the beam bulkhead any access holes should be. (Yes there is a warning about drain holes, but I don't think that's the same as an access hole). So I just used my best judgement, helped along by reassurance by some pictures of other boats with a similar arrangement.

As mentioned, several of my cockpit compartments require pre-forming of tape flanges. I hate having to make these, and I bet I'm not the only one: they just never look as good as tape that was laminated in-place. So I tried to be creative and come up with a way to make a flange that wouldn't end up looking like a dog's breakfast:

It's just a short piece of pine, with the top edges rounded-over, and a couple of screwing flange supports attached. The supports don't extend all the way to the front so I have room to smooth the tape out against the hull side. I'm not sure it was worth even this little effort, but it didn't turn out too bad:

See that white stripe thing extending across the top of the flange\tape? I didn't cover that portion of the mold with masking tape - duh. Such an idiot. Good thing I removed the mold while the tape was still green, or it would have been a real mess.

One more picture of my flange-making efforts:

I won't do pre-made flanges for the compartments that are open to the cabin interior, but I've decided to do complete flanges for all the other compartments. I just don't see how I could do a very good job of taping while working through the two access holes, even if the boat was inverted.

I'm getting excited about glueing on the cockpit seats, but I have almost decided to first do some (rough) fairing, priming, and painting of these compartments while I still have good access to them. It will be just impossible to do any quality work on them later through the access holes.