Working on beam mounts

Well I took the plunge yesterday and cut the big holes in the side of the boat. I was still afraid of this step so I tried to cut the holes well on the inside of the lines, in case I made mistakes. This has led to lots of extra trimming and re-work in order to expand the size of the holes to get the mounts to fit properly, causing me to fiddle around with these things most of the day. Ian's jigs are just great - once I had the holes big enough to work in, and once I had the beam bulkheads trimmed and chamfered, everything started to line up almost perfectly. Almost as if I knew what I was doing - not!

Trimmed rear bulkheads:

You can see in the picture above that I haven't yet cut through the coaming completely. Yes, I do have the stern support in place (need to take a picture), so no real reason to leave it like this. That said, my coaming was so high that I'm able to fit the entire jig+mounts in place with about 1.5-2" of coaming left....that coaming was somewhat flexible before the mount holes were cut, but now it feels like it's under quite a bit of stress... I'll leave it for now and trim it if it gets in the way.

This is the rear beam mount jig:

I began working without the lower-folding strut alignment brackets in place, in case you're wondering (see below).

Forward beam bulkhead:

A forward beam mount in (roughly) the right position:

One comment: despite all of the previous precautions during the bulkhead taping stages so many months ago, it's pretty clear to me that my bulkheads are not vertical as they should be with the boat leveled on the gunwale lines. The rear beam bulkheads are not too bad, but the fwd ones are at least a 1-2 degrees off, and worse they're not both the same. I haven't fully thought this through, being more concerned for the moment about the rough fit, but will have to think of a plan tomorrow. Probably said "plan" will be to just make the jig plumb, then fill in any gaps with HD bog....

Last thing for the day was to disassemble everything and add the LFS alignment brackets:

Back at it tomorrow...it would be great to get the mounts glued in place tomorrow, but it takes a lot of time working single-handed to get this stuff done.