Sunday, November 25, 2007

Starboard cockpit floor taped

I'm really speeding along here at one bulkhead per day. Still, better safe than sorry with these slow cure times. Here's the cockpit floor after taping:

Here's a view of the underside:

I also got the aft cabin bunktop taping areas ready, for doing the flange for the starboard bunktop half. I think I will put the port hull half back on the 2x4's, then slide it over to the side so that I can work on that flange from the outside of the hull - it would be very difficult to do it from the inside. But that will be the last thing I do - I don't want to move the port hull half until absolutely necessary, in order to keep everything aligned as possible. Overall, the bulkhead alignments are turning out really nice - I am pleased.

I'll have to squirm through that passageway above to get to the aft cabin, when I tape the aft cabin fwd bulkhead - ought to be a lot of fun. :)

Also got the beam mount flange extensions trimmed. First I made a template that matched the side-profile:

(That side flange has a lot of squandered glass and epoxy -- in retrospect, I could have used 7"x10" pieces of glass to reduce the wastage. But it's not that big of a deal.)

After marking the side profile with the template, I used the jigsaw to cut off the really big chunks. After that, it was full speed ahead with the sander (hallelujah for 40 grit!), grinding all of the edges into shape. I am very pleased with how they turned out -- from some angles, it's hard to tell which half of the flange was the original. Here's the finished mounts:

And from another view:

With the beam mounts done, all I need now is a joined hull to install them in.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jay -

The beam mounts do look good -- and it was fun to see how far you've come in the last year.

The last three days of sun allowed me to work on my garage extension, and tonight I just finished moving my garage door to the new opening. So getting close to starting.

Jeremy has finished planking his first float half and will be laminating it soon.

Andrew.

Jay said...

Thanks Andrew.

Glad to hear you'll be starting soon...and sounds like your brother is just really cranking along. Nice work.

Jay