Monday, September 17, 2007

Starting to trial-fit bulkheads

After yesterday, I had told myself that I wasn't going to post for awhile until I had some real progress to report. That lasted until this afternoon when I started playing around with the bulkheads - it put such a smile on my face that I had to share some pictures.

One half of my bulkhead collection finally gets to see the light of day, after being stored since winter:

There's a bunch more left in the basement, like the settees, forward cabin bunk, etc. The rolled-up uni glass you see on top of the hot box is for the starboard main hull (keel and under-deck strips) - it was just easier to cut it out all at once.

Initial fits not looking too bad:

The main cabin aft bulkhead appears to have a pretty large gap between it and the overhead\deck. But this isn't a precise placement, so I won't get too worried just yet.

Me holding up the aftcabin lower aft bulkhead:

One excited boat-builder:

Okay, enough tooting my own horn -- time to get back to work.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jay -

You've got reason to smile - it looks great!

Andrew.

Lance said...

Loose is OK, 'cause you can always adjust with the filler.
Looks really nice at this point with the progress. This is the fun part-like one big model being assembled.

Fram said...

With a little loose and filler you get a very good fit of the bulkhead. It's difficult to get filler behind a tight fitted bulkhead.

Ooops, I hope you understand what I mean.

Henny

PS I've enjoyed the almost daily update of your progress. Keep up the good work !

DMTim said...

Seems odd that the bulkheads are not one piece across the hull - seems that that would help hold the two halves together and make a stiffer structure. Perhaps this isn't an issue. Besides, full-width bulkheads would probably be difficult to move around and work with.

Jay said...

Thanks all, for the compliments.

Agreed that you don't want the bulkhead fit to be *too* tight, but I suspect that the form frame for the deck foam at the aft end of the main cabin may have "bent" or leaned slightly outwards. That particular frame is awfully thin at the bottom. We'll see how it turns out.

tjp - according to Ian's comments, the boat is actually stronger with the extra fiberglass (tape) down the middle of the boat (but I suspect it is not stronger by a drastic amount). It is possible to build the boat in the way that you describe, but of course you need a lot of head-room over the strongback in order to lower the upperhalf with its protruding bulkheads. If you look at the pictures of Oliver Dom's mainhull being constructed (at http://www.bukvaj.com), you can see that they did it that way for many of the bulkheads. Because of my building tent, I have to leave everything sliced down the middle.

Jay