Sunday, March 2, 2008

Aft bunktop flange and anchor well prep

Well, so much for "getting back to boat building", as I said oh-so-optimistically last month. Let me get the whining out of the way: 1) the weather stayed cold and I'm a big chicken; and 2) I've been putting in a lot of extra hours at work. Which sucks - but work is what pays the bills, both for food and epoxy. Have to keep that in mind.

I finally got back out to the tent and taped the underside of the aft-cabin front panel:

The next day I slid my upper hull half over to the side on 2x4's, so I could work on the aft cabin bunktop flange from the outside:

On my first hull half I didn't do all of the flanges that I should have, so I'm trying to do a better job now. I knew from taping the aft bunktop on the the first full half, that there's very little room to get in there. For the flange on this one, I decided to make a cut-down mold plate by tracing the real bulkhead:

In the picture above, I'm using my daggerboard-to-be as a work table.

After covering the mold plate with masking tape, I fitted it into place:

Then I mixed up a bunch of bog (you have to fill that crack up quite a bit, in order to have a reasonable curve to the glass) and taped against the mold:

(Sorry, you can't see much in that picture but it was the best of the bunch.)

When I got up this morning, the flange glass was still a bit tacky so I decided to let it sit another day. What I should have done was work on mounting my bow web in the hull, but because it was a bit chilly I decided to work on the anchor well for awhile instead. This turned out to be more work than I expected and I didn't get much else done today.

Here I was routing out the slots for the battens:

The plans say to make four mold patterns, but the back of the well is almost 4' wide; I guess you could get by with just four, but you'd have to leave the battens hanging out quite a ways unsupported. So I went back and made a fifth one. Here's the the basic mold all done:

After the mold was ready I planked it and then bogged between the planks and filled in all of the holes:

That's where I left things for today.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jay,

Nice to have you back at building (and posting) again.

Cheers, Hans van der Zijpp

biol said...

Hi Jay and welcome back !
Building should be a pleasure and "not building" should not let you feel guilty ... for me it helped (to stop the standstill) to post on my blog, even if OT, just to react against tiredness, as well as to read other people posts.

So keep posting !

Ciao