Sunday, April 1, 2007

Minor progress today

Today was mostly a day for catching up on family time. My wife has been really great so far about the project (thanks honey!) but I have been spending a lot of evenings working on the boat and didn't want to push it too far without a break; so I only had time for a few hours worth of work today.

The weather since yesterday evening has been terrible -- cold and rainy. When I checked my bulkhead flange laminates this morning, the first float was mostly cured, but the second float was still a bit tacky. I decided to leave the flanges alone for another day, but I did get the floats back into the cradles: here they are sitting together:

There's not much room to shuffle along beside them when they're together like that. I was able to lift the floats all by myself (one at a time) to get them into the cradles, but my back did not enjoy the experience. I'll avoid doing that in future unless I have to.

I then decided to tape my bow struts into place, and that went pretty quickly:


Later this evening after dinner, I decided to glue my bow caps together:

It looked and felt like I was frosting a multi-layer cake. :) You can see that the blank will be just about wide enough at the top, but way too wide at the bottom; I am planning on using a reciprocating saw and a planer to make the fairing job go easier.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jay,
Have been lurking around your blog since the start: thought it was time to say gidday.
It staggers me at the conditions you have to put up with to build your boat. I live in the subtropics and cannot imagine working in the sleet and snow. Rain maybe, but only when the temp is 30 degrees(90 fahrenheit).
Congratulations and well done.
Daniel
(Brisbane, Queensland, Australia)

Jay said...

Hi Daniel - nice to have you, and thanks for the encouragement!

Yes, it is a bit primitive, but I'm sure others have built under worse conditions. The most frustrating part is not being able to make faster progress due to the weather. My boat tent shields me pretty well from the rain; the cold temperatures are what really slow things down.

I am looking forward to taking several weeks of vacation this summer for that reason. (Some would call this a perverse kind of vacation, but I can't wait.)

I certainly envy your climate down under.