Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Trial fitting more bulkheads

Been having fun getting more bulkheads ready to tape, and I thought the trial-fit details might be useful. I've been working the last couple evenings on the fwd bunktop, cockpit floor, and the aft cabin stern upper bulkhead, and I think they are about ready for taping.

Here's an aft view of the fwd bunktop being dry-fitted:

The fit from that view looks great IMO. However, I did somehow end up with a screwup near the bow:

Seeing this was quite depressing -- where did I make a mistake? Bow battens? Bunktop cutout? Who knows? So I fired an email off to Ian describing the situation and he sent the following reply which I thought was worth sharing:

[This is] not unusual, as it is very hard to always have a good fit, and particularly in bows which are hard to draw on the computer. Just fill in gap with a foamstrip or bog and tape over. These are not unusual problems in boat building particularly with hulls - it is not a precise science yet.

That made me feel somewhat better -- just have to keep moving along.

Here's one more bunktop dry-fit view:

The cabin settee has to wait for the fwd bunktop to be taped, so I moved next to the cockpit floor. After some very minor trimming to get everything squared up and vertical, it was looking like this:

And:

And:

It's hard to tell from these pictures, but when I sighted along the bunktop and the cockpit floor, they looked nice and parallel, as they should be.

Finally, here is the aft cabin stern upper bulkhead:

And from the other side:

Some of these arrangements could benefit from more positive retention, but I think they will be okay as long as I'm gentle while taping (once you've got them bogged and filleted into place, they tend to stay put). After they're taped in place and the jigs are removed, I'll re-check them all with the level and see how good a job I've done.

Tip: if you have a straight bulkhead horizontal or vertical edge that just needs trimming by a half degree or so to be true, a flat sanding block works great - more control than the electric sander.

Finally, since the weather is getting colder lately, especially at night, I've moved all of my epoxy resins into the Great Carpeted Hot Box (aka my office). This makes my office a bit cramped, but I've lost more resin in the past than I want to admit, to excessive crystallization. (Yeah I've used the hot water bath trick before but the crystals always seem prone to reappearing, once they've shown up.)

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