Jay's F22

No workee on the boat

2010-09-19T18:30:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately this has been a very bad summer at work, with a lot of late nights and weekend work. I am saddened by the loss of much warm summer weather. I didn't intend to be on the Five-Year Boatbuilding Plan, but it may be turning out that way.

I was able to take this previous Friday off; my wife and I spent a couple of days in Port Townsend, WA in order to spend some time together. While I did not have any ulterior motives :), some of you may know that Port Townsend is the home of the Wooden Boat Foundation, (and an annual Wooden Boat Festival, although that was last week). While an F22 is not a wooden boat, it was fun just being around real boats, both in the shop and those that have made it onto the water (the town has a vibrant waterfront; when we were there several cruisers were moored offshore - no multihulls though).

The Wooden Boat Foundation has a spectacularly nice shop right on the waterfront. Most of us would kill to have such nice working quarters:

Here's a view looking the other direction from up above on the viewing balcony:

The shop is incredibly accessible to the public. Visitors are allowed to simply walk right in and view the proceedings, just about as close as you could want.

This made me chuckle:

In between walking all over town and visiting antique shops, I was also able to sneak in some visits to Pygmy Boats and Brion Toss Riggers.

Anyway, hope all is well out there in the F22 boat building world.

Extra layer of cockpit seat foam

2010-06-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

Tuesday night I did the final taping on the settee backs - phew, glad that's over. I admit my interior is very basic, but at least it looks like a completed basic interior. I have a few minor upside-taping jobs that will wait until I flip the hull over, but for the most part the interior is done (well, I am contemplating adding a couple of shelves in the aft cabin :)).

Wednesday night I cut and fitted the extra cockpit seat foam layers, and glued it on with bog and wood blocks to hold it down. I tried to relieve the bottom of it in various spots so that it would lie flat as possible (e.g., over the extra uni covering the ends of the aft beam bulkheads).

And tonight, after trimming up the raw foam and rounding over the edges, I laminated the top of the extra seat layers. Port side dryfitted:

Here's a rare picture from the middle of the job (usually I don't like to stop when I'm "on the clock"):

And with peel-ply:

Onwards and upwards. This weekend I hope to get the boat out of the cradles and turned on its side so I can start doing the exterior laminate on the beam mounts.

More settee work

2010-05-31T17:30:00.000-07:00

It feels like all I did this weekend was work on the settees.

Using a template to mark access holes for the storage compartments:

Mold plate for the settee back taping:

Mold plate for the upper taping:

In hind sight, I think the taping could have been done from above, through the access hole covers, especially if the window cutouts were already done. It turned out okay though:

After the taping was done, I spent a lot of time cleaning up the insides of the compartments, plus digging the foam out of the access hole edges and filling it. I also trimmed the jagged tape edges with my Multimaster tool; forgot to take a picture of the end result, but trust me it looked great :). Here's all of the trimmings though:

In the picture above you can also see my coaming compartment access hole - I filled the edges on those holes too this weekend. In fact I spent a LOT of time digging out edges this weekend. Here's the settee tops getting done:

And here we are with the settee backs glued into place (not yet taped):

The idea with the settee compartments is that they are accessible via lift-out access covers, but the space on top forms a storage "tray" itself for casual items, bags, etc. I also filled the edges on all of the access covers:

I thought for a long time about extra amenities like a sink, stove, etc, and how and where those might fit into the cabin. In the end though, I'm trying to keep it simple - we can always bring along some water jugs and a camp stove. I don't see us going on anything longer than a 2-3 day trip anyway. And oh yes, keeping it simple means I might actually finish the boat one of these years....

Coamings laminated

2010-05-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the dry-fitted and dry-cut glass for the fwd cockpit coamings:

Wetted-out and peel-plyed:

The glass that wraps-around into the beam mounts was a pain, and I suspect some of it probably lifted off after I quit for the night; will have to fix that later.

You can see in the pictures that I already did the rear cockpit coamings; I used a red sharpie pen to mark the cut lines, but it looks ugly so from now on I will keep to black :).

Here I'm scribing the settee storage compartment top:

Scribing is one of those things that once you "get it", your life becomes much easier...it's a very cool technique.

That first night I taped the undersides of the settee tops (lots of fun), then did the top taping the next night:

I've also been trying my hand at welding. I can safely say that it will take some practice before I try to do anything important:

Here's some observations on welding from a complete newbie:

It ain't as easy as it looks on YouTube. :)
Heat control is everything. The tenth bead in a row on a piece of aluminum requires a lot less heat (amps) than the first one.
"Dipping" the rod without contaminating the electrode takes practice - each of the dark spots in the picture above is a spot where I screwed up.
Proper sharpening\shaping of the tungsten electrode makes a huge difference in how the arc behaves.
The foot control is easier than the hand torch finger control (since you already have the "give it the gas" instinct from driving a car).

Those of us here in the U.S. of A. have a three-day holiday coming up (Memorial Day), so hopefully I can make some good progress over the next few days.

Rear beam mount taping plus settee work

2010-05-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

I've been forming the rear mount tape flanges by using pieces of plexiglass as mold plates; it was a slow process, basically doing just one side at a time, but I was able to complete the job without having to roll the boat over, and without too much contortionism:

Tonight I glued on the foam pieces:

Tomorrow or Saturday I will be able to trim these up, round the corners, and start laminating them over.

I started working on the poptop setup again. Before our move to the new house, I had drilled pivot holes in the coaming, but they were too low - the bolts could not bottom out. So I filled those holes and then redrilled new ones a bit higher:

You can see I am trying out the plastic bearing pads, but it is hard to get them smooth and clean looking - I think I will switch over to a ply-based pad.

Here I have dry-fitted the settee backrest and am drawing a cut line (with a very crude jig) to make the top of the backrest parallel with the settee seat:

In a previous step I also positioned the backrest to be parallel with the front of the settee seat. Due to a lack of any real sailing experience, I have been unfortunately very indecisive about how to organize most of the storage space in this boat. Deciding that any decision was better than further delay, I've decided to organize the settee rests (both port and starboard) into three simple compartments:

The top of these storage compartments will be a piece of solid foam\laminate; the storage space (what there is of it) will be accessed via small removable doors in the backrest (to be hidden by the backrest cushion).

I also formed the reinforcing shoe for the back of the daggerboard case; here it is, not yet laminated over:

In the "New Toys for Jay" department, I just bought myself a new welder this afternoon, from the Central Welding Supply store in Redmond. It is a Miller Diversion 180 TIG welder:

You can argue that this is overkill for finishing up the small handful of parts on this boat (and you would be right) but I look at it as an investment for additional projects down the road. For starters I plan to make a welding cart to wheel this thing around, then I will move onto the mast support pieces and the pulpit. No I have never welded before, but I've read several books on the subject so I'm sure I'll have no problems (that was humor, by the way).

I am also looking at anodising options for all of the aluminum pieces on the boat (no other builders seem to mention this - are most folks skipping this step as a "nice to have"?). So far I have not found a business that will do small jobs for any kind of a reasonable price. My backup option is to learn how to do it myself. Reading around on the internet, the process just doesn't seem that hard (famous last words? :)) and there are DIY kits available, for example from Caswell Plating. You can even get color dyes to jazz up the boat a bit.

Back in action finally

2010-05-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the port rear coaming, after a lot of trial-and-error trimming:

Unfortunately I made a minor mistake back when I was taping in the cockpit seats, by fiting & taping the seat all the way up next to the beam mount recess glass. Here's the part I need to cut away in order to attach the rear coaming panels per plan:

After I realized my mistake, I looked more closely at the various plan sheets, and sure enough the information was there had I just read things more carefully. That happens more often than I'd like to admit. RTFM! Anyway, the inner coaming side pieces are bogged into place, tomorrow I start taping them:

On the bright side, having to trim the seat (right next to the beam mount and outer hull) motivated me to invest in my very own Fein Multimaster. A very nice tool, but pricey - yet, it's really an investment that I can use on lots of other projects. :)

You can also see in the above pictures that the forward coaming tops are glued on, and you can also see that I have opted to trim the cockpit side to be flush with the seat; originally I was going to extend the coaming all the way back, but I had second thoughts after wondering where any water on the seat would go. This way hopefully it drains right over the side.

I have also formed the flat spot for the mast step, along with trimming\blending the last exterior beam mount.

I have the aft-cabin traveller almost done. Here I'm getting ready to laminate the blank:

I regret now, buying so much 4.2 oz/yd^2 carbon fiber uni glass, since the plans called for several layers of 13 oz glass. So for every plan-specified layer (four of them), I had to actually cut and laminate three layers of the 4.2 oz stuff, for a grand total of twelve layers. My 4.2oz uni came in a 12" wide roll, so I had to trim it up:

Laminating so many very thin and long (6') layers of carbon has other challenges too: really need to watch out for air entrapment, and it is harder to keep so many layers from moving around while you're working out any bubbles. Both sides of the traveller have their uni done now, moving on next to glassing the ends and the final carbon wrap. So far it's turning out really nice, will post a pic when done.

One thing: after laminating the uni onto the first side (bottom) of the traveller, I set it out in the sun to cure, on top of the black plastic covering my floats. I swear that the traveller was 100% straight and plumb before that - but when I went out to check it, the heat from the sun and the black plastic warped it slightly, resulting in a very slight bow in the middle (in the vertical direction). I am still scratching my head on this, it doesn't seem possible especially with the aluminum insert running the length of the traveller. Weird - but I'm not going to worry about it for now.

I've been working on the daggerboard too, trying to finish the fairing. Here I'm chugging away, drilling a knot-retaining hole on the wrong side of the board:

Not sure how I did that. Note to self: see comment above, under Plans: Not Reading Closely Enough. I repaired the damage by packing the useless hole with high-density bog, which will hopefully wear better than the cedar, so maybe it turned out okay.

Moving the boat into the garage

2010-05-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

Our usual spring rainy weather continues on, and it has been depressing since it's difficult to work on the boat while it was tarped down. I can't setup my boat tent yet either, because the location needs to be graded for better drainage and then gravelled. I did get a quote for the grading and gravel work, but it was too expensive to consider right now. So although I can work on small jobs just fine, I was still feeling a bit bummed by all of this (our rainy weather sometimes doesn't cease until after July 4th). Luckily my wife came to the rescue and suggested that I just move the boat into the garage. She must really love me I guess :).

Here's my son standing in front of the boat after we pulled off the plastic:

Using my old neighbor Sean's dollies, it was a piece of cake to get the boat into the garage:

Working indoors on my boat...now this will be a treat! Once I let the boat dry out, and give it a good vacuuming, it will be ready to go.

I also glued together the blank for the traveller, dado-cut a slot for the aluminum piece, and glued the aluminum into the blank. This was mainly because it could be done in the garage, but I think I need to focus on catching up on small tasks that have been accumulating. In no particular order:

Exterior glassing of beam mounts
Finish cockpit construction
Finish fairing the daggerboard
Fit poptop hardware
Fit the interior settee-backs and glass them in.

There's more, but those are the big items I remember. I have a busy summer ahead of me.

Finally, I also built six drawers this weekend for underneath my bench. This may not sound like much, but I have never built drawers before so I feel pretty good about getting them done. I glued and screwed them together this afternoon, will start installing them tomorrow. All in all, a productive weekend.

Shop is about good enough

2010-04-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

Well, another weekend where I didn't do anything but unpack, organize, and clean the garage. The good news is that it's just about done. My son and I built a 16' bench against the back wall, put up some Elfa shelves, moved lots of miscellaneous stuff up above the garage, and made multiple trips to the dump for all of the other crap I decided to get rid of. This isn't quite as organized as I would like, but at least it is a workable space now:

Boat stuff is on the shelves to the left of the window, regular tools and garage stuff on the right. I set up an epoxy station underneath the window to the right. I'm thinking about building some drawers underneath the bench too. One thing I don't have yet is a fiberglass rack on the wall - not sure if I am going to do that, because frankly there isn't much fiberglass work left on this project.

Starting shop cleanup and prep

2010-04-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

We're almost settled into our new house. Not everything is perfect, but enough so that I'm feeling the need to get my rear in gear on my F22 again (finally!). I had thought I might be mixing some epoxy this weekend, but instead I spent the entire time working in the garage (and attic over the garage) trying to get things organized and free up space. Not a whole lot to tell here, just hard work. I did free up some space though, by hanging my rowboat from the ceiling:

And all the way up:

The 2x4's on the ceiling are screwed into joists with 4" Spax lag screws; the boat was then hooked up to heavy-duty eye-bolts, and I layed the oars inside the boat as well. Pretty sure it will be strong enough. I tried to check the pull-out strength on the Spax web site, but they only had shear strength listed.

These pictures also give you a good idea of the regrettable state of disarray in my garage. I am missing the garage cabinets & workbench in my old house, for sure; but I'll be getting new ones here eventually.

Boat move to the new house

2010-01-03T18:30:00.000-08:00

Now that we're pretty much moved into our new house, it was time to move my F22 hull and floats to the new location. I had planned this almost a week in advance to happen today (Sunday, January 3rd) at 9am. The exact time was important because I was asking several of my old neighbors for help with the move, and I didn't want to waste their time by not being 100% ready to go. Fortunately, everything went like clockwork and at 9am today, the boat tent had been completely cleaned out and I had disassembled enough of the side fence to get room to move the boat through.

As you may remember my F22 had been left sitting on its cradles, which in turn were sitting on top of the strongback which I had yet to disassemble. My initial plan was to simply man-handle the hull off the cradles, then lift-slide it forward until we reached the truck ramp. One of my neighbors had a better idea: use some dollies to maneuver the boat on. We switched to this method shortly after getting the boat completely off the cradle and it worked great: we were able to dolly the boat completely into the truck, then lift it back up to get the cradles back underneath. During unloading, we left the cradles in place and dollied the boat down like that.

Okay here's some pictures; squeezing the hull through the hole where the fence was:

The view from the other side (bow is sitting on a baby mattress which is on top of a dolly):

Then we added the second dolly under the aft end, and simply pushed the boat along the board "runway" we had laid down:

Starting to head up the ramp:

The dolly wheels bumped pretty easily over the ramp-truck bed join, and it wasn't long before we had the hull in the truck. We put the cradles back under the boat and strapped it down tight:

Note, I have submitted a trademark application for "Tri in a Truck" - if you wish to use it, email to arrange royalty payments :).

The rental truck was a Nissan diesel box van; the box was 26' long, so plenty of room length-wise for the hull, but it was pretty tight width-wise:

Driving such a behemoth of a truck was quite the adventure though, I must say. Really gotta watch the corners!

Unloading at the new house:

Unloading was a breeze with so many hands! I really cannot thank my neighbors enough for being willing to give me a few hours of their Sunday morning; thank you Bill, Sean, Scott, and Jim!

After the main hull had been moved, my son helped me move the floats. No dollies for these, we just carried them right up the ramp. Here they are all strapped in:

I also got a good start on disassembling the boat tent; the main cover and the end covers were taken off and taken to the new house. Here I'm removing the pipe clamps that hold the end panels on (yep, I'm sporting my winter beard again too):

Last picture for now: spreading the main boat tent cover on the ground so we can carefully fold it up:

The area next to the garage where I was going to set up the boat tent proved to be too marshy according to the grading contractor, so he is coming back out this week to re-grade the area (and provide a new drain path for surface water), then gravel it. I should end up with a really nice "pad" to work on. In the meantime, the floats and hull have been left on the driveway under a large piece of black plastic. We're obviously swamped with all of this moving stuff, but I hope to get started on some boat stuff again in the next couple of months.

Cockpit hatch and compartment work

2009-09-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of progress lately everyone. It turns out that I am human after all - I cannot simultaneously hold down a job, build a house, and build a boat. The job and the house are high-priority right now, so boat progress has been suffering.

This is the jig I made for locating the poptop support-arm pivot holes:

The jig was made as square and level as possible, so that I could get all of the pivot holes in the same plane. That part actually worked as intended, except that the holes were located too low in the coaming - the bolt heads wanted to dig too far into the surrounding deck next to the coamings. So I ended up filling the first set of holes and will need to re-drill them a bit higher.

The pivot arms themselves are pretty easy to make:

I also already have the UHMW plastic and the jib track+slides, to complete this work. I bought a large block of plastic and have been using the table saw to cut it into the appropriately sized chunks, per the plans (jig-saws don't seem to work for this, so far all I get is a dull blade and messy cut with melted\bubbled plastic):

I've also been working on the cockpit coaming compartments. As mentioned on other blogs, these compartments seem intended to drain into the under-seat compartment and then out. Well on my boat I wanted the under-seat compartment to stay dry. To fix this I decided to laminate some foam across the back of the compartment all the way to the coaming top:

The above compartment is obviously in primer - I did my best to fair out the interiors, but again it will be a workboat-only finish. Since taking that picture I've finished painting them and am now considering how to use some plexiglass for use as a mold, for the pre-formed flangs. The above picture also shows you the "curve" I did for the inner compartment wall. I don't think I'm perfectly per-spec on this, but it's close enough (and it looks nice, which is important). And both port and starboard compartments are nearly identical in appearance.

Finally, I had a visit today from Thatcher (lives in Seattle) and his dad John (lives in Montana). We had a nice visit talking boat stuff; they also brought along a six-pack of Moose Drool beer, a Montana-brewed beer. While bringing beer is certainly not a requirement, I enjoyed it very much. Thanks guys!

Outboard engine

2009-08-08T20:30:00.000-07:00

After more investigation, I finally settled on a Tohatsu 6hp 4-cycle outboard engine: the "MFS6BUL SailPro" model, with a 25" shaft. I bought mine online from Online Outboards; they had a good price to start with; combined with free shipping and no state sales tax, it was the best deal I could find.

My nephew Daniel and I slapped together a storage mount for the engine when it's not on the boat:

I will order some casters to make it easy to move around.

I am also investigating outboard brackets. My goal is to know, well before fairing or painting, exactly how my outboard will be attached so I do not have any problems later on, e.g. with extra reinforcement. Adventure Marine has a simple but expensive fixed bracket, and I am also looking into the various Garelick models.

Regrettably I have some deadlines hanging over my head at work, so today was a short day on the boat, and tomorrow I will be at the office. I did finish taping the settee stiffeners in place. I spent a lot of time studying the settee seat back arrangement (see my post on the google F22 group), and also spent a lot of time dry-fitting the fwd coaming panels before finally settling on an arrangement; I then laminated the backsides of coaming panels and should be ready to start installing them next time. Oh wait, shouldn't I fair, prime, and paint the coaming compartments first? :-)

Cockpit seats glued on

2009-08-02T20:00:00.000-07:00

The poptop hatch got an extra layer of A around the top outside edges:

I'm debating whether to put an extra layer of A on the top part. I also have collected all of the raw materials to start assembling the poptop hatch mechanicals (aluminum bars, bolts\nuts, plastic, jib track & slides, etc). I will start on that part of the project as soon as I have finished up most of the smaller jobs going on.

Yesterday I finally finished painting the cockpit compartment interiors; it took me all week to finally get down to 400 grit (yeah right). The weather has been crazy-hot lately, and it was a few degrees above System Three's suggested max temp for paint application. I compensated by thinning the paint with some slightly chilled water. I think it turned out ok:

Definitely a "work boat" finish, but plenty good enough for me. Here's another view in better light:

Here's the strategy I came up with to glue the settee stiffeners at a nice square angle to the settees: The fwd-most clamp does not have a piece of wood, since I didn't think I'd be able to get the screw out once the stiffener was glued in place. Here's a cross-section of one of these stiffeners:

I over-built the stiffeners a bit; two layers of A on each side, then the layer of A around the bottom curved edge, then another layer of A on the top edge (after routing a nice curve onto the front edge):

Eventually after I flip the hull upside down, I'll use A tape along the bottom inside join. So far, the results are quite satisfying: the settees have become nearly rock-solid places to sit. I am still however at a loss as to whether I should enclose the space beneath or not; rather than torture myself further, I decided to just leave the settees as-is for now. (With the limited space in that area, I shudder to think about if\how I'm going to fair the area fwd of the daggerboard case...)

With the compartments painted, I was finally free to glue the seats on:

Not shown in the above picture, but the initial perimeter taping on top of the seats has been done as well. I also dug out the foam from the extra layer on the aft-cabin hatch and filled it with bog (man I hate that job).

Last but not least, I began making blanks for the settee backs.

Cabin poptop hatch unmolded

2009-07-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

Monday night I laminated an extra layer of A on the inside surface of the hatch (since the plans say A-core-A, and the inside only had B). Today I unmolded the hatch and it doesn't look too bad:

And:

Clearly it will need some trimming (both to level it out, and to shorten the sides) but I'm feeling better that it doesn't look too lopsided or otherwise unsalvageable. I plan to clamp some temporary wood supports to the hatch coamings on the boat to hold the hatch up, then scribe a trim line so the hatch fits reasonably close to the deck.

I also laminated a layer of A around the bottom edge of my settee stiffeners. Wrapping that relatively heavy glass around a 3/8" edge is hard. I routed a curve on both sides, sanded it smooth, and put a thin layer of bog on the edge and sides to help hold the glass in place, but it still kept wanting to lift off from that edge. So I brute-forced the job: continually pulling the edges of the peel-ply down on each side to force the glass back around the curve, until the epoxy finally started to setup hard. A fun twenty minutes... Clamping is another option but a clamp hard enough to hold always seems to leave indentations in the glass; not sure which option is worse. Anyway it's done and both stiffeners are sitting on top of the boat; they should be nearly post-cured after tomorrow's anticipated 100 deg F day.

Cabin hatch cover mess

2009-07-26T20:30:00.000-07:00

My wife and I celebrated 21 years of marriage last week - yay us! Not bad for a couple of kids who were initially only given six months to make it. We didn't do anything fancy (my wife is saving up for something big on number 25), but we did spend all day Saturday driving over to see Grand Coulee Dam; this may not sound very romantic but we both enjoy looking at monumental engineering accomplishments, plus it's a nice long drive so we get to spend time together (Hoover Dam is another one of our favorites). Here I am in front of the dam:

Anyway, that trip plus a busy work week means I haven't got much done on the boat. Today I got a late start (slept in after the trip); first I taped the port settee that I glued in last Tuesday. Then I made a four-sided mold\form for the main cabin hatch cover:

In retrospect, this was a stupid way to do it. The hatch cover meets the front angled mold plate in a a compound curve that is basically impossible to get right with hand-trimming. Don't do it this way, follow Menno's example by laminating the back and sides first, then trim off the front at an angle, then do the front. I spent what seemed like forever trying to get the front of the hatch to fit against the mold, at the same time as levelling the hatch cover within all four sides (and of course you're constantly afraid that you'll trim it too far, which makes the whole process go slower). Finally this is where I decided to leave it (you can't really tell, but I used an epoxy fillet in each corners to form a radius):

You can see that the hatch is not quite level within the form....I will have to trim the hatch edges to make it level. Or maybe I'll leave the rear of the hatch higher than the front, for a "hot rod" look. I got the inside laminated and then quit for the day:

And darn it, I didn't sand out the cockpit compartment primer yet...one thing for sure, that stuff is hard after baking in the tent all week. :(

Multiple small things going on

2009-07-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

Made slow progress this week. I've started on the main hatch cover, by extending the edges of the cutout:

The curvature of the long side extensions did not quite match the rest of the cutout (they don't curve "down" enough), and I will have to long-board them or something to get them to look ok.

I have started making the 4" stiffener extensions for underneath the main cabin settees:

I am still unsure about what to do with the under-settee space (choices are, enclose into storage compartments, versus netting for hanging "loose" storage). Netting seems quickest and easiest for sure - if anyone else has gone this route, would you drop me a line and let me know how well it works?

Three generous coats of primer have been applied inside the cockpit compartments:

I almost started sanding them out today, but decided to wait longer to ensure the primer has cured nice and hard. I am using some left over System Three two-part primer and gray paint (from my 8' rowboat project) for these compartments. The primer did a nice job of covering up many of the smaller dings in the compartments; I think it will look good enough when I'm done.

The port settee has been glued into place, on top of the pre-formed flanges. Back when I did these flanges (a year ago?), I experimented with taping a layer of plastic, then peelply, around the edge of the settee, to use the settee itself as a mold. Unfortunately the tape holding the peelply and plastic keep slipping off, and it turned into a disaster. The resulting flange was far from even or flat. To counteract this, I put a small strip of masking-tape-covered wood under the tape, then screwed into it from above, to try to clamp the tape to the settee:

Here's a picture of the under-cockpit passageway, looking forward from the aft-cabin:

This next picture is a bit dark, sorry. It doesn't show much...

...except for the dark border around the aft-cabin hatch. I formed a 2 1/2" flange around the hatch (on the interior side) and glassed it over: this is because the installation instructions for my hatch say that a 3/4" flange depth is required. One nice side-effect is that the hatch hole has been dramatically stiffened.

Cockpit drain holes

2009-07-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

Although I was tempted to just glue my cockpit seats on so as to maintain the visible forward progress, I bowed to others' wisdom and decided to paint out the cockpit compartments first. Note: although I am not trying to win the "Best Little Cockpit Compartments in Texas" competition (that honor will go to Ed), I do want things to be smooth enough that blindly sticking a hand in there will not result in any scratches from errant fiberglass spikes. So I first sanded things down, then applied a thin layer of my Alexseal fairing compound:

I have been thinking of trying a home-made fairing compound; the Alexseal stuff cures really hard and is difficult to sand. Isn't that what micro-balloons are for, to make an easy-sanding mixture? Unfortunately I still have a few gallons of Alexseal left to use up, and there's no way I'm wasting that expensive stuff!

I am really kicking myself for not cutting out the drain holes in the cockpit seat fronts before taping them in place. One reason I was thinking that it would better to do this post-taping was because the extra cockpit deck foam would would need to be taken into account. I should have just done the drain holes anyway, but made them 3/8" higher! I think (deep-down) I was simply postponing a simple job so I could get immediate visual gratification by taping the seat fronts in....bad habit for a boat builder. Long story short, I got to spend some time today carving out some drain holes. First I used a Rotozip to get the rough outline cut open, then I used the Fein Multimaster to smooth out the entry from the cockpit deck. Digging the foam edges was a bit tougher, but I found that a paint can opener tool (with the little hooked end that goes under the edge of the paint can lid) worked well for this, in this little space. Here's the port drain hole; you can also see the external drain hole:

It would have looked much cleaner if I had done this before bulkhead install, but I'm confident I have sufficient drain capacity, per the plans.

The foam edges of all four drain holes have dug out and filled with bog.

I was not looking forward to sanding inside these compartments; my Festool RO125 sander is too big to work well in these spaces. I tried using an old Makita orbital palm sander we had in the garage, but that thing was so torquey that it was hard to manage. I treated myself to a new Festool DTS 400 sander after work today:

The new sander really worked well, and the dust collection is (as before) very nice. Merry christmas to me...!

When I was in the aft cabin this past weekend, I got a chance to examine my rudder web taping job. It's not...pretty. I cut some scrap pieces of foam-cored laminate into the shape of the rudder web access holes, and will glue them to a couple layers of A glass to form a flange (same thing Menno did for this bow bulkhead access hole), so that this area can be covered up.

Aft bunktop and extra cockpit deck foam completed

2009-07-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

Nothing big to report this week (i.e., cockpit seats aren't glued in yet) but I did get several small items done.

The rest of the B glass behind the main cabin hatch flange is done. I must say, that having this flange finished has totally changed, for the better, the ease of entry into the main cabin. Even as big as I am, now I can swing myself into the main cabin with ease, and not worry about hurting anything. I can stand on the bottom flange and it's just rock-solid, making it a nice staging point for getting around.

The main cabin hatch gussets have been laminated over.

All of the pre-formed cockpit tape flanges are finished. I need to make a decision soon on whether I'm going to paint-out the interior of these compartments before glueing the seats on. I am leaning that direction though.

Tip: I find the pre-formed tape flanges to be quite flexible after removing the mold. To stiffen them up, the very next day I coat the glueing surface of the tapes with a thin layer of bog. Then when I sand it later, I'm sanding the bog and not the glass, which makes it easy to get a nice rough surface. There's probably a tiny weight penalty with this approach, but better that than a poor bond between the flanges and the cockpit seat (esp the beam bulkhead flanges).

The edges of the cockpit compartment hatches, and the aft-cabin hatch, have been dug-out and filled with bog.

I got tired of looking at the missing second half of the aft-cabin bunktop, and so it has been glued in-place:

...and taped:

I think this was the first time I've ever been in the aft-cabin with the boat in the upright position...there is LOTS of room back there. Makes me glad I'm building this model.

I glued in the the second layer of foam for the cockpit deck out of smaller scraps, using pieces of wood to hold them down:

Dry-fitting\trimming the A glass over the new foam layer:

And then in the middle of laminating:

Things are moving right along.

Take me out to the ballgame

2009-07-12T19:00:00.001-07:00

I'm not that much of a baseball fan, but my wife and I do like to go see a Seattle Mariners game once or twice a year. Today we watched them play the Texas Rangers - yay, we won; 5-3!

This was at the beginning of the fifth inning (if you don't believe me, you can check the scoreboard :):

I try to get reasonably good seats since we so rarely go to these games; today's seats were great, we were in row 31 and nearly behind home plate as you can see. Makes foul-ball action quite exciting; I was never close enough to get a hand on one, but one did whiz by only 5'-6' over my head.

The baseball stadium in Seattle has a neat feature in that its roof is retractable. You can read more about it at Wikipedia; today was the first time we've been there that they've closed the roof during the game; it was cool to watch. Contrast the picture above, with the following picture which has the roof almost closed:

The roof only takes ten minutes to close (not air-tight, it's designed more like a giant umbrella), which is nice when the rain starts to come down.

Lastly: while it's fun to watch a baseball game occasionally, I was telling my wife we should start going to some minor-league games again. For example, the Everett Aquasox (single-A affiliate of the Mariners); we've been to a couple of their games and the action is just so much more "in your face": instead of thirty rows back, you're less than ten rows back and MUCH closer to the field. Also, the minor league players, at least in the games I've been too, really give it 110% effort. You do see more mistakes being made, but that just makes things more exciting. And Everett (about 30 minutes north of Seattle) is far easier to drive to than downtown Seattle.

Weekend update

2009-07-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

It was a short work day today on the boat, but I made some progress. The cabin flange has been trimmed up, and the under-side B glass (two layers) has been done on the bottom portion of the flange:

The main cabin hatch coamings are all laminated:

The warm weather was very helpful in getting the glass to cure quickly around those tight curves. ("Warm" is relative of course; personally, I start to melt over 90 deg F or so... :). I have not yet laminated or filled the foam edge of the gusset; will be soon now that the coamings are done.

And some more progress on the cockpit seat flanges:

See how some of the tape edges are nicely trimmed and squared up? I discovered that a Fein Multimaster tool (borrowed from my neighbor Bill - thanks!) does a spectacular job of easily trimming these up. I also used it to trim the cabin flange back. If I had known about it, it would have also done a great job trimming the beam mount LFS flanges. This tool is going on my Christmas list for sure.

It's not shown in any pictures, but I also added a second layer of C glass to the doubler plates on all beam mounts. The original plans only specified one layer, so that's what I did (a few weeks back). I was breezing through the last plan update (May 2009) thinking that I could probably ignore everything in that update since it's primarily focused on the new style beam mounts; then I noticed the new beam mount sheets call for TWO layers of C glass over the doubler plates...so I added the extra layer, just to be on the safe side.

Main cabin flange

2009-07-04T21:45:00.000-07:00

The plans call for a heavily reinforced flange around the main-cabin entrance\hatch. I made up mold plates yesterday and then installed them this morning:

The straight blue lines are a reminder to me to overlap the glass at least that far, so I have enough to trim later on. Here's a view from above:

I laminated the bottom first (doing bottom and sides at the same time is left as an exercise for the adventurous reader):

With sides in place:

Side view after removing the mold plates:

All of this work was aided by the fact that we've been having a very warm weekend (high 80's deg F), so I got nice fast cures. Even so, I didn't watch the bottom laminate close enough and it cured into a slightly curved shape, instead of a flat flange with rounded edges. Ah well, could have been worse.

Here's how it looks from outside:

It would have been better to do this big flange before the cockpit seat fronts, but it worked out okay.

Finally, it's been a long couple of days in the sauna-tent, but I'm feeling good about my progress lately:

Tomorrow, I'll trim the flange and laminate the B glass on the other side.

More cockpit work

2009-07-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

I've decided to move ahead with the cockpit compartment plan in my last post. Here's one of the new bulkheads in place:

You can also see where I drew a line around the bottom edge of the cockpit seat, so I'd have a guideline for constructing pre-formed tapes if necessary - which it will be for the two aftmost compartments, unfortunately.

Safety compartment bulkhead set in place, along with both hatch holes cut:

Cutting the exterior hatch hole in the picture above made me a bit nervous, but I think it will look okay:

I moved the placement of the safety compartment from port (where it was in my plan, last post) to starboard after very careful consideration. Namely: I'll normally be towing the boat in the right-hand lane most of the time, and with the safety compartment on the starboard side passing drivers won't be able to see it. :)

Here I'm working out the placement of the hatch for the semi-dry compartment, and the access hole for the wet compartment:

One of the hatches set in place:

And voila, all the holes are cut:

There's no real guidance in the plans for how far away from the beam bulkhead any access holes should be. (Yes there is a warning about drain holes, but I don't think that's the same as an access hole). So I just used my best judgement, helped along by reassurance by some pictures of other boats with a similar arrangement.

As mentioned, several of my cockpit compartments require pre-forming of tape flanges. I hate having to make these, and I bet I'm not the only one: they just never look as good as tape that was laminated in-place. So I tried to be creative and come up with a way to make a flange that wouldn't end up looking like a dog's breakfast:

It's just a short piece of pine, with the top edges rounded-over, and a couple of screwing flange supports attached. The supports don't extend all the way to the front so I have room to smooth the tape out against the hull side. I'm not sure it was worth even this little effort, but it didn't turn out too bad:

See that white stripe thing extending across the top of the flange\tape? I didn't cover that portion of the mold with masking tape - duh. Such an idiot. Good thing I removed the mold while the tape was still green, or it would have been a real mess.

One more picture of my flange-making efforts:

I won't do pre-made flanges for the compartments that are open to the cabin interior, but I've decided to do complete flanges for all the other compartments. I just don't see how I could do a very good job of taping while working through the two access holes, even if the boat was inverted.

I'm getting excited about glueing on the cockpit seats, but I have almost decided to first do some (rough) fairing, priming, and painting of these compartments while I still have good access to them. It will be just impossible to do any quality work on them later through the access holes.

Cockpit compartments?

2009-07-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

I spent too much time today staring at the plans and at other builder blogs, trying to get a handle on how I'm going to subdivide the under-seating area in the cockpit. Here's one possible design I came up with:

Obviously I'm trading off those big interior compartments for more "semi-dry" storage for the cockpit. But I think this is a reasonable tradeoff, since this is an aft-cabin model (ie, there's plenty more storage in the rear). The small space behind the aft beam mounts will be made into a "wet" compartment, so that there is at least one path for water to drain out of the cockpit. If anyone has feedback on this, I'd love to hear it....very soon :), before I started taping the sub-compartment bulkheads.

I dry-fitted the starboard cockpit seat tonight...it needed only minor trimming (corners, etc) to fit into place:

Onwards and upwards...

Quarter-berth holes cut

2009-06-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

I didn't cut all the way to the top of the access holes, wanting to leave a bit extra in case the cockpit seats didn't line up perfectly:

Dry-fitting the fwd cockpit seat fronts (the port side has been bumped out of alignment):

After getting happy with the fit, I tacked them into position with some bog. This is right after taping them into place:

The bottom edge of the quarter-berth access holes was rounded with a 1/2" round-over bit, then covered with a piece of A glass (I figured this little edge will get bumped quite a bit).

More mount work; starting cockpit

2009-06-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

These are the pieces of hardwood (maple) for the compression pad reinforcement; two thick coats of epoxy were applied to ensure waterproofness:

I glued them both in place (no glass yet) to ensure they wouldn't move around later, at the same time I glued on the fwd mount doubler plates:

Here it is after laminating the uni and C glass (hard to see details in this picture, I know):

I spent an hour or two sanding the exterior of the starboard front mount; sanding inside the beam mount "arm" gets tedious (can only get a few fingers in there), but I'm almost ready for glass on this one:

Next I worked on the fwd beam bulkhead "flange". Following Menno's example I used some leftover foam (I have more left than I want to admit) to form the mold flange:

The plans call for several layers of uni glass to wrap around the entire edge of the mold, forming the bulk of the flange; I didn't use any overlaps which resulted in a very long stack of glass:

The uni glass (well-soaked in epoxy with slow hardener - this was a long job and I wasn't taking a chance it would kick on me before I was ready) wrapped beautifully around the flange mold:

I also did the fwd-side layers of C glass while the uni glass was still wet; the thin crack in the picture above requires a few layers of C glass, which was difficult since I could barely get my fingers in there. Ended up shoving things in there as best I could with a brush; I hope it works.

Minor builder's tip: I don't know how other folks do it, but a strategy I use is to wet-out all of my tape outside the boat, and then carry it into the boat on a board. The tape gets wet-out first (even when using fast hardener, once it's laid out flat the cure will proceed slowly enough to give me time for the other steps); then I mix up some bog to use for fillet material; then I move the tape over to a small portable board covered in plastic; and then I carry the whole lot into the boat. Peel-ply gets pre-cut (as best I can predict) and pre-staged near the lamination site; once you've got the wet glass on the surface you want to move quick to get the peel-ply applied. I use the little 2" disposable chip brushes for applying the peel-ply (fingers tend to move the underlying glass around too much). This is some of the glass tape for the forward side of the bulkhead flange:

The uni-glass for the flange turned out awesome. Here it is the next day after stripping off the foam mold plate:

This afternoon I finished off the last of the flange glass. I did this lamination in two halves, starboard first, then port. The starboard side was easy; on the port half, the upper glass sections kept wanting to fall for some reason. To fix this I clamped a piece of wood to the flange to hold things in place:

I've also started on the cockpit. For some reason, I didn't notice until today that I could have already installed much of the cockpit stuff (bulkheads, seat fronts), way back on sheet 19. No big deal though, just means I had more room for doing the aft beam mounts. Good thing I noticed it though, because at the same time I realized that I still had not done the cross-cockpit uni glass that was called for on sheet 19; so that got done Saturday night. Today I taped the main seat fronts in place:

It might have been easier if I had cut the compartment access holes first before taping these in place, and also the drain holes...oh well. After studying the various options, I decided that I am going to make the quarter berth openings from inside the boat (mainly for more dry storage, I doubt we'll be doing any overnighters with anyone other just my wife and I); I also plan to make the safety-compartment as called for in the plans.

Forward beam mounts laminated

2009-06-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

Managed to finish interior lamination on the forward beam mounts (front and back) this weekend. I feel like I accomplished something...this was a lot of glass and epoxy...

I screwed pieces of plywood (covered in masking tape) against the sides of my forward beam mount mold plates in order to cover up the gaps, and to give me something to work against as a guide when fitting in foam fillers:

This is the port forward beam mount, with my pieces of filler foam dry-fitted; I wish I had been more judicious with my hull trimming, so I didn't need so much foam (but thankfully bog hides all):

This is the forward side of the starboard mount, after lamination and after I removed the peel ply:

I had to cut one or two "darts" on the forward sides and then patch them, but otherwise the main C laminate was again done with one single piece of glass. I am again very happy with the laminate quality, things turned out just beautiful.

I also did a bunch of clean-up on the aft beam mounts: trimmed off the excess LFS flange material, cut\sanded off the jagged glass edges, and sanded off excess bog that squeezed through next to the mold plates. I also glued on the doubler plates to the aft mounts. Be careful, the doubler plates are also a slip-fit over the bushings, so before you fillet and glass one side, make sure the doubler on the other side is at least set into position first (or else you'll knock the first doubler out when you start hammering on the second side...). I'm getting close to being able to work on the cockpit furniture.

Aft beam mounts laminated

2009-06-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

The geometry of the beam mount mold plates and how they get fitted into the boat may be interesting to some, so forgive me if I have quite a few pictures in this post. First up was the tedious job of finishing the mold plates and wrapping them with masking tape. This gives you an idea of how I held the pieces together:

Set into place:

I had a reasonably tight fit to begin with, but later I secured the mold plates with some duct tape to the outside of the hull to make sure they didn't move around. I also checked the mold plates for level and plumb, although this wasn't specified in the plan and therefore isn't critical.

Backside interior view:

Top shot:

Dry fitting the glass to get an idea of how big a piece I needed; once I had the first piece traced out, I used it as a pattern for the other pieces:

I used one single piece of glass for each of the main "C" layers. It really wasn't too bad that way, just takes time to massage the glass around all of the curves (of course it's easy on the aft mounts since there's a lot of room to work in).

I'm very pleased with the final lamination quality:

It was helpful that I did this on a very warm day, so things were curing nice and fast. I tried not to use more glass that was needed to get the specified 3" overlap, but in the middle of a lamination it's hard to remember to stop and trim glass...trimming wet glass is especially not-fun.

The mold plates popped out relatively easily, thankfully. The finished (exterior) surface turned out very nice (kinda hard to see in this picture though):

The beam mounts (unsurprisingly) require a huge amount of uni glass...my once gigantic roll of uni is shrinking rapidly:

Here's my "jig" for cutting "D" uni glass to a 3" width:

And finally, here's all of the uni glass required for both forward beam mounts, including the pieces trimmed to fit against the roof...phew, this was a lot of trimming and cutting!:

I am almost ready to laminate the forward beam mounts. Still thinking of the best way to close up some of the gaps between the hull and the mold plate.

Compression pad lamination

2009-06-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

This morning I dismantled the beam mount jigs; there was only a little bit of "spring back". I sanded down all of the rough spots left from the bog job and filled the bolt holes in the LFS brackets per the plan.

Next up is the lamination process. I had previously made the compression pad formers, so that saved some time:

Laminating these things was a bit of a pain. My uni glass should be good quality stuff (purchased from Ian at beginning of project), but it is not very flexible and likes to return to its original shape. This particular lamination has several curves, and worse, much of it is upside down. After messing with the first one for a bit, I decided to not trust it and used the heat gun to speed up the cure while continually pressing the glass back into place.

Here's a view of a finished compression pad:

I also did the initial uni and C glass on the rear beam mounts:

Doesn't seem like much for several hour's work...

Beam mounts bogged in place

2009-06-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

I didn't have much after-work time this week; only enough to spend an hour or two fine-tuning the jigs and the alignment. I dbl-checked everything this morning and took the plunge. All four mounts are now thoroughly bogged into place. I hope it's good enough, but in all honesty I don't think I can get it any better; my jigs are laser-levelled, mounted, and plumbed, and I've double-and-triple checked everything. Famous last words...I'll look back at this post with irony when my floats don't fold properly :).

In my last post I talked about disassembling the jigs in order to get bog thoroughly between the beam mounts and the beam bulkheads. I asked Menno about this offline; he said he didn't do it, and when I rechecked the plans they don't mention any such step either. So I decided to "build to plan" and just glue them in-place, in the jigs.

Starboard aft mount:

Notice that the LFS bracket area has a small piece of tape. I did this on on both aft mounts, on front and rear, as an attempt to force the mount to stay plumb once I un-jig them. I hope this works...

Starboard forward mount:

You can see in the picture above that I trimmed the hull back far too much; there's no way I could get bog to fill that much of a gap so I filled it with small scrap pieces of foam.

It requires some minor contortions to squeeze under the alignment board, in order to work on the front of the fwd mounts, made worse by the daggerboard case. A centerboard boat would have more room in this respect.

Despite my earlier statements, my fwd beam bulkheads turned out to be far from plumb (to the gunwale line). Disappointing but what can you do but carry on? The mounts themselves are jigged plumb, but this meant the mount could not lay flat against the bulkhead so I had to fill in the gap with bog. I was very diligent about getting plenty of bog down into the gaps so I think it will be okay.

One of the long-standing "mysteries" of this particular building step, is how much the LFS brackets would protrude outside of the hull, and at what angle. I'll be brave and show some pictures of mine, and hopefully I won't get an email that says "you did it wrong"... :)

This is the foward port LFS beam mount bracket:

It sticks out quite a bit, and looks really non-square. It will be interesting to see how this gets trimmed back and blended into the hull.

Here's the port aft bracket:

Clearly much of the "L"-shaped bracket edges will end up as scrap...

Finally, in the family news department: this past Wednesday, my son Zachary graduated with his Bothell High School class of 2009 - congratulations, son! Tonight we're attending our nephew Daniel's graduation ceremony; he's graduating from Lynnwood High School, class of 2009 - congratulations Daniel! We're very proud of both of you!

More beam mount prep

2009-06-07T21:30:00.000-07:00

Only had the afternoon for working on the boat, but I am very close now to glueing the beam mounts in place. Despite my misgivings yesterday, things are starting to look pretty good: all four mounts are leveled, side-braces are installed, and the only thing left to work on is fixing the starboard forward mount to be vertical. It's not too far out right now, but I didn't realize until after I quit for the day that I was trying to adjust it with the mount still clamped to the bulkhead:

Here is one of the side-braces:

No the brace is not touching the hull, there's a sliver of space between them. When I first saw the side-braces in the plans, I thought they'd be flimsy and do almost nothing to help the beam mounts stay aligned. I was wrong, they actually helped quite a bit.

The rear beam bulkheads are not vertical unfortunately, and needed some shims to help get them there; I was thinking I may tape the LFS brackets on the rear mounts right after glueing, rather than relying just on fillets to hold them vertical:

Oh yeah, here's my stern support:

I haven't constructed an inside-the-boat brace to ensure squareness (like Menno) but I did check the diagonal measurements (at centerline+12" on each side) and only had a 1/8"-minus difference. So I am just about ready, since I don't believe more work at this point will result in more accurate results. I think I can fix the one not-quite-vertical mount during glueing with some careful shimming.

One thing that the plans don't mention, is how to apply bog\putty to the mount flanges (and behind the bulkhead 'bar') when the mounts are all tightly jigged into place....seems like taking them apart would be the perfect opportunity to throw everything out of alignment. I think though that the LFS brackets can be done "at leisure" after the upper mount flanges are glued, re-jigged, and re-aligned. We'll see.

Working on beam mounts

2009-06-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Trailers, outboards

2009-05-31T19:45:00.000-07:00

I have started to do some research into trailers, mostly by looking at the EZ Loader and King Trailers websites. This morning my wife and I drove down to Boat Country, the local King Trailer dealer. After talking with the salesman and showing him a copy of sheet 61 that shows the trailer details, he suggested that the KB2800 model would work fine. He explained that the choice of trailer here is governed by the boat length, not weight, since my boat will be relatively light. This trailer only has two bunks, but sheet 61 seems to show four...? Or is it two for the main hull, and two small bunks to help support the (folded) floats?

Anyway, there were several KB2800's on the lot and I looked one over really well, as I have never towed anything in my life and the mechanical details of a trailer are new to me. It looked like a really nice trailer. The saleman quoted me a price of $2147 plus tax. Well, I wasn't about to buy one today, and I need to take a look at an EZ Loader trailer in order to compare, but at least I now have a # to start planning the budget with... Anyway if anyone knows of a better or cheaper direction to go on this, please feel free to offer advice (other than "build your own trailer").

Boat Country is also a Honda outboard dealer, which got me looking at the Honda 5hp model they had in the showroom. I had previously been considering a Tohatsu 6hp, but the Honda looked like a fine little motor. I think 5hp would be more than enough for an F22? Anyone disagree?

Preparing for beam mount installation

2009-05-31T19:30:00.000-07:00

I had laminated a flange for the foredeck hatch and finally got around to installing it this weekend:

In retrospect, it looks somewhat chunky...maybe that should be the name of my boat ("Chunky"). The hatch mounting surface is nice and level though, and rain should run around the flange rather than directly against the hatch. Here it is with the hatch in place:

I will round over the outside edges and pretty it up a bit, but it looks good to me.

You can also see in the picture above that the anchor well is now taped in place. That job was more work than I expected, well at least the inside taping of the well compartment was no fun.

I cut the hole for the aft-cabin hatch as well:

In looking at the plans again, I think my aft-cabin hatch is larger than specified. Well too late to go back now... I have to add another flange to make up a 3/4" mounting thickness (per the hatch install instructions) so I think this will help strengthen the hatch opening.

As usual there are quite a few odds and ends I could work on, but there is nothing major left that must be done before I install the beam mounts. So I started studying the plans today to get ready for this important step. It takes awhile to get your head wrapped around the geometry of what is going to happen; well at least it does for me. Can't afford mistakes on this particular step!

Here I'm making up the mold plates:

Being able to actually hold the mold plates against the mounts is helping to clear up a lot of questions I had....makes more sense now.

I re-borrowed my neighbor's laser level and re-checked the level on the boat at the gunwale points. Not too bad, only fell out of level less than 1/2" and it was easy to fix. Next came marking the cut lines on the boat. I went low-tech with this and just made up cardboard templates:

Then I used a small level to figure out where the corners of the template fell on the hull, then connected the dots. The outlines I ended up look pretty good. And yes, I realize the template is backwards - I screwed that up on both fwd beam mount points before realizing my mistake (but didn't take a picture after fixing the orientation...).

I am looking fwd to getting the beam mounts done; once there, I can finally demolish my strongback (the only reason I'm still using it is because it is a fairly level surface) and set the boat directly on the ground. Which should make it easier to get in and out of.

Laminated anchor well supports

2009-05-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

This is a short post. Had a few hours after work and got to work sanding down the fairing compound in the bow. It is actually starting to look pretty good, I am getting excited. However the very bottom of the bow bulkhead is terrible to sand - I can only get about two fingers in there. I may visit an auto body shop tomorrow, maybe they have some cool sanding attachments I can put on a drill.

I squared up the anchor well hatch and it is looking pretty nice IMO:

I also sanded down the hatch supports I installed over the weekend, and the hatch is sitting nice and flush with the hull now. I figured this was a good time to add the extra reinforcement:

Obviously I'll trim off the excess.

I am still researching what kind of a latch I should use for the anchor well hatch. I don't want it just flapping in the breeze....a simple tension latch should suffice, but the marine ones are a bit pricey.

More hatch work

2009-05-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

I started sanding this morning in the bow area, but then realized that I'd better get the anchor well hatch supports installed so I wouldn't drip stuff onto a faired surface. (Or maybe I was just looking for an excuse not to sand?) I scooped out the edge foam from the areas-to-be-exposed on the supports, filled them with bog, let them cure in the sun, then installed them:

From underneath:

They look a bit chunky from underneath - I think I made them a bit too long. Well no-one well ever see them unless they stick their head into the anchor well....

Later I did a test fit of the hatch-to-be:

Not too bad, but I think my supports stick out a bit too far, thus holding the hatch a bit too high. It will get worse when I put some glass on the upper portion of the supports too - I may sand them down a bit. The hatch doesn't look like it is sitting square in the hole either - will need to trim things up for appearance's sake.

I'm mildly concerned about the weight-bearing capability of these supports. I don't know how to do the math, but I doubt there's any way they will hold a grown man stepping or jumping on the hatch. On the other hand, I don't feel like investing the effort to make them that strong. So I won't put no-skid on the anchor well hatch, and will just have to be careful. Nevertheless, I taped each support with two layers of A, just to be on the safe side. This took some time as I had to build up a fillet to transition from the support to the cabin roof - should have created the fillet from foam; that would have been easier (and lighter).

Here is my bunktop hatch flange:

Getting installed:

I haven't taped underneath yet. Looking at this picture, in retrospect I probably made the flange too wide, thus taking too much away from the open area. Oh well.

While waiting for the stuff above to cure, I decided to cut out the poptop hatch opening. I don't know that I'm at the right point in the process for this step, but I was getting pretty darn tired of contorting myself to get into the boat from that end. Now I have a nice big hole:

It is much much easier to get into the cabin now. I noticed also that heat escapes from the cabin more easily, a nice bonus.

I kept going and installed the hatch coamings:

The forward coaming required some work with the heat gun to get it to bend to the shape of the cabin roof. The side pieces were fine as-is. Unfortunately, I screwed up slightly when I cut out the hatch hole: I used the coaming-to-coaming dimension as my cut width, instead of adding the width of the coamings. So my hatch width is .75" times 2 equals 1.5" too narrow. I didn't realize it until later after the coamings were installed. Well it's not fatal but now I get to mentally adjust all of the other dimensions with respect to the poptop.

Before you ask where is the high-density inserts in the side coamings, well I made all three coamings from high-density. More weight true, but I still have some to spare might as well use it in a good spot.

I had a great holiday weekend, and felt like I made substantial progress on the boat (and found time to mow the lawn too). With the supports installed, I need to keep working on sanding in the bow area until I feel ready to tape in the anchor well. From there I should be moving fairly quickly to beam mount installation.

Hatch work

2009-05-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

Was able to spend several hours on the boat this evening. Am still mostly focusing on the bow area. Did the cutout for the foredeck hatch:

I find that the hole in the bow is a convienent spot for propping up the vacuum tube for easy access.

These are my two Lewmar low profile hatches, one for the foredeck and the other (larger) one for the aft cabin:

I laminated the anchor well cutout in preparation for pressing it into duty as a hatch. This is the first time I've used "poor man's vacuum bagging". Wow - maybe I got lucky, but the results were spectacular. Great laminate quality and not a single bubble!

It would have worked even better if my plastic didn't have a bunch of folds and creases in it, but I was still quite impressed. As others have said I don't think it will work well on surfaces with compound curves, but otherwise it's a neat trick.

I spent a lot of time digging out the edges of the anchor well and foredeck hatch holes, so I could fill them with bog. The foredeck hatch hole edges have already been filled, here I'm working on the anchor well hole; digging these edges out always takes a lot longer than I think it should:

This is a stack of four anchor well hatch supports (I'm doing mine like Menno), made from the scraps from the anchor well blank, clamped together so I can shape them in one go:

These will be for the side supports; there's not much room for the top and bottom supports and I will wait to do those. I plan to get these supports glued on and laminated before I laminate the anchor well into place, so I can easily test-fit the hatch fit.

Finally, I have a laminated flange curing right now for the foredeck hatch and will hopefully get that on the boat tomorrow. I started some sanding of the fairing compound in the bow area but didn't get far due to limited time.

Starting to fair the bow interior

2009-05-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

I cut out and edge-filled the 6" inspection hatch for the fwd bow compartment. Due to the water-tightness requirement (presumably in case of collision), I'm going to use a low-profile inspection hatch. Also spent time sanding and cleaning up the bow cavity work from yesterday.

I dug out my fairing compound supplies and did some work on pre-fairing the anchor well; here it is getting a suntan to help it cure:

I had a visit from Andrew this afternoon. He wanted to take a quick look at the main hull and see how things were going. It was fun talking with a fellow F22 builder.

After that I decided to start fairing the interior bow area. I'm dreading this job, so I figure I might as well get it over with. Took longer than I expected to just get the fairing compound applied, and it was nearly impossible to get it smooth in the very front area, eg under the bow bulkhead. Had to resort to using a gloved finger to spread the stuff around and hope for the best.

This is how I left it for the night:

I haven't yet installed my flange for the large bunktop hatch - that space is excellent for kneeling in while you work on the fwd area, so I decided to wait a bit.

I'm still thinking about the paint I'm going to use for the interior. Probably going to just use Alexseal again, but I think I will roll-and-tip this time; I can only imagine the blinding spray cloud that would develop if I tried to spray inside the boat.

Tomorrow I will be spending most of the day with family, but by Monday for sure I will be wearing a respirator and sanding on the interior. I'm not sure when I'll be ready to install the anchor well, depends on how the sanding goes. Also planning on cutting out the fore-deck hatch for better access after the anchor well is installed, and cutting out the poptop area - right now it's pretty awkward getting into the boat from the cockpit.

Bow cavity filled

2009-05-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of hours after work this week doing tedious hand-sanding of the tape edges inside the bow cavity, and finally deemed it good enough to move to the next step, filling the cavity with foam. This job is not that hard but it does take awhile to get the area filled up reasonably solid with foam, mainly again because of the small area:

No the foam fit is not perfect, but thanks to the magic of bog there's no need to worry. You can tell from the picture above that my bow web somehow ended up slightly offset to port - my hull halves didn't fit so well near this area, and I had to do a lot of "coaxing". It's not that noticeable especially from the outside so I'm just not going to worry about it.

Here's the foam chunks numbered and ready to go (I didn't want to lose track of the right order, in the heat of battle); the non-numbered piece in the foreground is the top "plate":

All done, foam bogged in and a top layer of tape in place:

Looking at the plans afterwards I think I filled the cavities slightly higher than I should have, but there's still a reasonable angle for good drainage and plenty of room to drill the drain holes.

I've also been working on an under-flange for the large fwd bunktop hatch. The edges of the hatch hole deflect more than I would like when I am climbing around in there, so I decided to beef it up a little, and also provide a lip for the hatch to sit on:

I ran a small roundover bit around the exposed edge of the flange and have finished laminating glass around that edge. Tomorrow I'll glue it into place, then tape it in from the bottom. Not sure if I'll tape it in from the top as well, the extra glass might interfere with the hatch fit (but I could trim the hatch of course).

Bow bulkhead taped

2009-05-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

Taped both fwd and aft sides of the bow bulkhead, including along the bow web of course. Here's the fwd side, pre-taping:

I really like how the above picture shows that I am incapable of cutting a circular hole....but at least the foam core edges have been filled with bog! :)

Taping the above area sucked for me, just like it has sucked for everyone else. Here's how it looked after taping...on second thought, I don't want to show this picture. You show me yours, and I'll show you mine....

Thankfully I did the tough part first, then moved to the inside:

The taping job above should turn out nice.

Before I quit for the night, I laminated a couple layers of A onto the cutout from the bow bulkhead hole (to form a flanged hatch), and also put a single layer of A on the large fwd bunktop hatch cutout.

Getting back into the swing

2009-05-17T19:30:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that I took several months off from boat building. Which sucks, but work has always been a priority for me (especially in tough economic times like this) and I didn't feel like I had much of a choice in the matter. I got a little bit done last weekend, but this weekend was the first one in a long time where I was able to spend lots of time on the boat. We had a very nice weekend, so the boat was like a sauna inside the tent, but I enjoyed being outside and getting stuff done.

The transom is all buttoned up except for a little bit of foam to dig out near the rudder mount:

It turned out pretty good IMO, with a double-thickness of foam all the way around. I wrapped the trailing edges with glass instead of filling them with bog. The transom edges feel solid as a rock. I also worked on a boat levelling dry run (covered in a previous post).

I spent a lot of time on the anchor well, the blank for which has been sitting in my downstairs since last year. I printed out the fwd template that was missing from the plans, traced the templates on, and cut it out a little bigger than the templates (wanted to leave some room for error). After a couple of hours of sitting in the boat trimming it back with the sander (and sweating like a pig), I finally got a pretty good fit:

In some spots I trimmed a bit too far but overall the fit is good and the gaps should be easy to fix later when I tape it in:

Twisting and turning inside the bow area made it very, very clear to me that this area of the boat needs to be finished up as much as possible. It will be difficult to reach anything once the anchor well is installed. So most of the day was spent on odds and ends toward the goal of getting the fwd interior done. I scraped out the bow web deck hole edges and filled them with bog; also did that for the larger fwd bunktop hatch. Thankfully I had saved the two bunktop hatch cutouts (must have been from 2+ years ago); first I scraped out and filled their edges with bog, and glued them together. I am looking into the best way to attach this as a "hatch"...maybe just a flange to hold it in place with a smooth finger hole to lift it out?

Here I am scraping out the large fwd bunktop hatch edges with a chisel:

I've been looking at Menno's site to see how he did his anchor well hatch and it looks pretty good; I may copy his technique.

Last thing I did for the day was tack the bow web bulkhead into place. I don't normally tack pieces, preferring to tape them in one step, but the bow is a miserable area to work in. I'm not looking forward to taping the inner area around the web itself.

In a recent builder's update, Ian mentioned that he'll be selling F22 rudders soon. I had previously started to make one from foam, but it wasn't going very well. I may bite the bullet and buy one from Ian just to jump-start my progress and help me make the most of this building season. Sorry guys, I know that will make me a "cheater". :)

Floats are patiently waiting...

2009-05-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

For me to finish the darn boat that is! I'm thinking about moving the floats from their current spot so I can mow underneath them and spray some vegetation killer. Poor things have weeds growing up between them:

Otherwise they don't look any worse for wear other than being a bit dirty.

Dry run on boat levelling

2009-05-17T19:15:00.000-07:00

I have had a nagging worry all along that my boat would be out-of-square to the point where I would not be able to install the beam mounts properly. Although I am not ready for these just yet, I decided to do a test run and see just how bad (or good) things really were.

The most accurate gunwale markings I have left are on the beam bulkheads, so I cut out enough of a hole so that I could screw or clamp a small piece of straight wood to each bulkhead. The wood is fixed so that it is even with the gunwale marking. Then I hung tape measures down from each piece of wood. This was so that I could aim a laser level (belonging to my neighbor Sean - thanks for letting me borrow this again) at each tape measure and get an accurate height reading on the gunwale mark at each beam bulkhead. Other builder have done similar things. I aimed the level at a point on the tape measures about 26" below the actual gunwale line; that way the level can "see" the tape measure at all four points.

Here's a rough sketch of the method, excuse the sloppy freehand drawing: Here's a tape measure hanging down; after awhile I scrounged for every tape measure we had in the house so I didn't have to keep moving it around:

The initial readings were actually very very close. When I made my boat cradles, I designed them so that the boat would naturally sit as close to gunwale level as I could get it. The measurements showed all four points within 1.5". Not too bad!

I used an automotive bottle jack to adjust the corners:

Then I'd screw some extra supports to the strong back to hold the cradle at the new position...

...and remove the jack. Yeah I have a big cleanup job under the strongback someday.

I couldn't get all four corners level after 1/2 day of fiddling with it, and sent mail to the F22 builders group on google asking how close the level needs to be. Ian himself replied offline and told me to check sheet 49 where he talks about this. Darn - hate to waste people's time when the answer is in the manual.

I did figure out that one problem was due to the strongback or the cradles "settling" after I'd remove the jack. After that, I was able to get three corners level and the fourth out by only 1/16". According to Ian and the plans this is plenty good enough. Now I'm no longer worried about my lopsided boat and am looking forward to starting the beam mount installs (but have a lot of work left to do before I get there).

R.I.P Scale #1

2009-05-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

My old electronic scale seemed to be taking longer and longer to zero out. I hadn't been exactly super careful about keeping it clean either . So I decided it had to go to scale heaven; rest in peace, Scale #1:

Welcome to the world, Scale #2:

Rudder web reinforcement

2009-05-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

Woke up to a strange sensation this morning: didn't feel like I had to be at work for most of the weekend. It was about time for a break anyway - "all work and no play", etc.

I wasn't able to spend all day on the boat unfortunately. Had to run some errands, and mow the yard, but then I got busy cleaning out the cobwebs from the boat tent. I had left a 1/2 gallon of S3 laminating resin in the garage over the winter and it had crystallized pretty badly, so I also had to do the hot water bath treatment to clean that up. Just to get back into things, I decided to do the additional rudder web reinforcement that Ian had sent out via email since it looked like a simple job. Here's the first three layers of uni over the top:

It's been so long that I had to look up the S3 resin-hardener ratios online before starting, since I couldn't be sure I remembered them accurately. Here's the job done with the final reinforcements on and peelplyed:

Not much to see in those pictures, I know.

I also caught up a bit last night with everyone else's building blogs - wow. You guys out there have been really productive - good job everyone.

It was a beautiful day today, by the way:

Finally, something slightly off-topic (but what the heck it's my blog right?). My wife and I are getting ready to build a new house, so that's another reason I've not been engaged on the boat as much as I would have liked. If anyone's interested, there's a link to a new house blog at the bottom right of the page that I'm going to use to track our progress and capture the experience. We should be breaking ground very soon, then construction is estimated to take 8-12 months. We will be sad to leave our current neighbors after nearly twelve years, but we're excited about the new location. Anyway, this gives me some things to keep in mind this year as I'm working on the boat: I need to be careful not to do anything that will make it difficult to move the boat, e.g. like starting on the beam mounts and not finishing them! I'll also need to research and buy a trailer this year. So....look for an unfinished F22 being towed down a local Seattle freeway, sometime around Christmas... :)

Beams, weather, distractions

2009-01-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

Weather's been unseasonally cold for most of the Seattle area this year, and I haven't been able to summon the willpower to work outside in my boat tent in 30-40 degree weather. So, no major updates, folks.

Yes, I did get my beams out of "jail". Ian does a nice job of packing them:

I even have my very own customs inspection sticker:

I'm scheduled for a small surgery (tonsillectomy) in a couple of weeks. By the time I recover, we should be in mid-February and I'm expecting the weather to warm up enough by then that I can start making some progress again. Yeah, I know - excuses, excuses.

One of these days I need to post a picture of my floats...this is their second winter sitting outside, and while structurally they're fine, they look quite forlorn: dirty, surrounded by tall grass, huge weeds growing between the floats, etc. The paint is holding up well, sometimes I'll wash off a small section just to see the shine come back. :-)

Waiting for beams to get out of jail...

2008-11-13T20:00:00.000-08:00

My trip to China went well. I spent a week in Zhuhai (quite humid even in October) and the second week in Shanghai. My first trip ever to China, and it was just a lot of fun overall. Air quality definitely was not as good as here in America, but otherwise you just really get a sense that China is just this really booming, growing place (I stayed in the cities, no rural visits for me). Labor and goods are darn cheap! - you can stuff yourself on an elaborate lunch or dinner for hardly nothing, like $6-8. My chopstick skills got pretty good too. Lastly, my work colleagues went above and beyond in taking me out to see stuff - thanks guys!

[Edit: thought I'd add a couple of pics and thoughts from my trip.]

This is some random street in Shanghai; note the long pole things used for drying laundry:

I was amazed at how many bicycles you see in China. Sometimes after people would get to work in the morning, you'd see a hundred old bikes all lined up and locked to a street fence. It was no big deal to see office workers pedalling down the street going to work (including women, in skirts and heels). This picture is actually of a bike rental place, but it gives you an idea:

People seemed very thrifty. Old bikes (and motorcycles!) don't get thrown out, they just keep getting fixed and used and fixed and used and.... Kinda cool.

Traffic was especially crazy in Shanghai...you don't want to drive there, and you have to develop some extra guts to be able to cross roads. Despite the craziness, I never once saw an accident.

One day I had the chance to take a Shanghai subway during morning rush hour...now I know what sardines feel like! :-) Amazing to see how hard the folks trying to get on the train will shove the people in front of them.

Last China thought: you don't see too many fat Chinese people, or at least I didn't. At least in the city they seem to get a lot more exercise than the average American's I'm used to being around. I joked a bit with colleagues about feeling "white food guilt" over there.

Anyways...shortly after I left for China my beams showed up in Seattle, but obviously I was not here to go get them through customs, etc. So when I finally got ahold of a customs broker last week, he was a bit alarmed that I had waited almost two weeks to get in touch. Apparently after two weeks the Federal customs folks get suspicious of the delay and may take possession of the shipment? He also said that infrequent importers (uh, that would be me...) tend to get more attention as well. Long story short, the Federal custom folks apparently decided to do some extra examination of my beams and I won't be able to pick them up until next week. I have this image of fierce German Sheperd guard dogs sniffing and drooling all over my new beams in their opened crate...hope they're ok.

The broker guy was also somewhat incredulous that any sailboat part could cost as much as the beams did...guess he's not much of a boat guy. And this led into the long explanation of "well, actually I'm building a boat" to "well a trimaran has three hulls..." to "so these parts I'm getting connect the floats to the main hulls..." It all seems obvious to me now that I forget a lot of normal folks don't even know what a trimaran is.

What's going on?

2008-10-16T03:30:00.000-07:00

I have 99% of the exterior lamination done (just a little touchup work left around the bow web). Have started thinking about how to level the boat and have been studying the the beam mount plan pages. Interesting stuff - I hope it goes well.

Ian finished making my beams and they are somewhere in the middle of the Pacific right now, aboard some ship named the Cap Saray. The ship will offload in Long Beach CA and then my beams will be trucked up to Seattle. Should be here first week in November.

As usual :) work has been keeping me busy. In fact, I'm preparing to leave very soon for a two week overseas business trip to China.

It's clearly been a disappointing year as far as progress on the boat goes, but such is life I guess. I'll just keep working at it as best I can.

More exterior lamination

2008-09-07T17:30:00.000-07:00

I'm not yet done with the exterior laminate, but it's getting closer. As of today I have run out of 'A' glass, so I need to make time this week to run up to Fiberglass Supply for more.

I've been lazy about picture taking lately, but here's a few. Here I'm sitting on top of the boat, cogitating about how I'm going to laminate the glass into the daggerboard case:

You can see on the starboard side where the leading edge of the laminate has reached. The port side is at about the same spot, and the rear half of the main cabin top is done. Also the bow edge is done up to the bottom of the bow web (still thinking about how to best blend that area into the hull).

I decided to pre-laminate the daggerboard case glass before the main exterior laminate...glad I did it separately, a bit finicky getting all this glass into place:

Now, when I do the main laminate, I'll just cut around the case hole and not try to lap it in (the glass over the flat spot will lap in a bit).

Lamination of rudder mount is completed:

(I keep the steel rod in the holes to protect them from stray drips of epoxy.)

Picture looking through the boat:

Despite the (relatively) high temperatures, the technique of coating the foam with bog before laminating the glass over it has worked great to prevent bubbles from showing up. Don't think I want to deal with all those bubbles again, and the attendant fairing issues.

I layed some temporary plywood on top of the cockpit floor, this helped a lot to distribute my weight and remove any worries about damage. Also, went with my wife to a craft store last week and they had sheets of 3/8" balsa that I could examine...wow, that's some pretty tough (and light!) stuff. I am now thinking of using balsa for my double cockpit floor layer.

It was very cool to see the video of Oliver's boat sailing...

That's all for now, hope all the other builders are doing well.

Aft cabin laminated

2008-08-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Wow but it's a hot day today. Might break a record - it's over 85 deg F right now at my house. And easily 90+ in my boat tent. This is relevant because right now I only have Fast hardener for my laminating resin...makes things interesting.

I spent the morning doing more rough-fairing of the hull. I'm just about done. Not super happy with the results - just too hard to get things looking nice when you're sanding both foam and bog. Not looking forward to the real fairing.

After I got 95% done on the fairing, I decided to do some lamination work, starting at the aftcabin. I laminated the cabin top, the gunwale\hull-sides below the aft cabin, and also did the uni-glass for the aft cabin. Here's a rare intra-lamination picture; I'm wrapping this piece of glass around the hull (foam is pre-bogged & wetted, so the glass sticks nicely) preparing for further wet-out:

Here's the uni at the rear of the cabin:

Not very interesting to look at, I know.

More transom work plus shop cleanup

2008-08-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

I've been working some more around the transom. Here's the rest of the double layer of foam on the hull areas getting fitted (left side already glued, right side dry-fitted):

Glueing the right side:

Cutting the glass to size:

With the lamination all done:

You can't tell from the picture but I made the fillets nice and large, and ran a round-over router bit over the edge of the rear deck, before lamination. Should look really nice after fairing.

I climbed up into the boat for the first time today and sat in the cabin - then fell under the "sailing daydream" spell. Felt really, really good to see what I've accomplished so far. The cabin feels roomy to me, even with the daggerboard case. I can tell that I'll have to be very careful walking on the cockpit floor - it's quite "spongy" under my weight. Best to keep my feet near the hull sides where the fillets and tape are.

I lost some time yesterday to a household plumbing emergency (leak) which kinda sucked. I've been working on rough-fairing of the hull foam - as usual it's difficult wherever you have bog sticking out. I'll do the best I can but will then leave it up to the fairing to make it look good.

I finished up the day with some shop cleanup and made a run to the dump to get rid of accumulated debris. This was needed to make more room along the starboard side of the hull - was getting tired of ducking under the gunwale:

Plenty of room in the "shop" for more main hull work now.

Osram VII site available again

2008-08-13T15:00:00.000-07:00

In one of my earliest posts I mentioned being inspired by Tony Bigras' Osram VII catamaran project. His website was down for a long time, but it appears that he has found some hosting space once again. I can't tell you how many hours I spent reading his stuff and looking at his pictures - I'm quite the arm chair sailor I guess. Anyway, it's definitely worth taking a look at in my humble opinion; click here and then click on "Older projects", then the Osram VII link.

I like his boat naming scheme, ie "Osram I", "Osram II", etc. I still haven't come up with a good name for my F22.

Main hull in cradles

2008-08-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

Slow day today, but I did get two cradles built:

Obviously one cradle is for form frame #5, and the other for #8. I measured the distance from the hull bottom to the gunwale line at each of those locations and built the cradles so that the hull would be positioned roughly to make the gunwale lines level forward-to-aft. I'm not expecting it to be perfect, but hopefully it will get me in the ballpark.

Later my neighbor came over and we got the hull lifted up again and positioned in the cradles, on top of the strongback:

Cradle fit turned out good (I traced the outlines using the FSP's):

Check out those snazzy handles on the cradles...and I wonder if the thrift stores will want their baby mattresses back - free! (only a little bit of epoxy added)

From the rear:

I can push down on the rear deck with just a little bit of force and lever the bow up into the air - pretty cool.

Eventually I will remove the strongback and put the cradles directly on the ground, but right now it makes a good level platform for installing things like, beam mounts.

I am thinking about making another cradle to support the transom. Although in theory it won't be needed after the exterior lamination is finished and the beam mounts are installed.

Starboard lower hull laminated

2008-08-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

This morning my neighbor came back over and we lowered the hull the rest of the way down:

No sounds of creaking or other distress from the hull so I'm assuming all is well. I rough-faired the lower hull foam and got ready for laminating. Here I'm rolling up 22 feet of 'A' glass on a tube:

About 2/3rd's done:

And all finished:

You can also see in the picture above how I've rough-faired the gunwale line as well; doesn't look too bad IMO.

I made sure I had the requisite 2" overlap at the join seam; usually it was more like 4-5" overlap, but in the heat of battle (laminating) I just wasn't willing to stop and trim things up. The keel is a good place to have a little extra glass anyway.

Our dog "Beau" was out supervising for part of the time; he's a 9 1/2 year old boxer:

Tomorrow I need to build myself some main hull cradles. Then in the evening my neighbor will help me hoist the hull back up and then lower it into the cradles. After that I'll start fairing the edges of the deck and gunwales and get ready for finishing the exterior lamination.

Hull removed from frames

2008-08-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in last post, it was time to remove the main hull from the frames. I've been both excited and nervous about this step - excited for obvious reasons, and nervous since I didn't have a really good plan in mind for how I would accomplish this. I decided to use my tent frame as a lifting point, although I wasn't sure if it would be strong enough (certainly the tent manufacturer does not support this type of use!). Lacking any other plans, I reluctantly decided to go ahead.

Fortunately one of my neighbors was willing to help me out, and he already had the necessary lifting equipment. Thanks a ton Sean - I couldn't have done this without you. (He was also much calmer than I was, since I had visions of fallen\smashed boat dancing in my head most of the time.)

Without further ado, here's some pictures; this is a lift strap tied around the hull:

We used an electric hoist for the rearward lifting strap; the hoist is chained to the bottom rail of the tent; the two wood braces are to minimize the bowing of the tent walls:

After achieving lift-off with just one strap (located at the rear main cabin bulkhead), we got busy removing form frames starting from the transom moving forward. The battens were cut away piece-meal from below using a cutoff tool, then were broken off as needed until each frame could be removed:

In the picture above, the boat is indeed being supported from above, but the clearance above the battens is quite minimal (we didn't have a lot of lifting room due to the low clearance at the top of the tent).

After removing up to about form frame 5 or 6, we attached another lift strap at FF #5, and picked up the remainder of the boat. For this we used a chainfall tied to the bottom support rail of the tent:

Hey look! It's a side-ways flying boat:

After that we rigged a couple of more straps under the boat, attached to the mid-height tent support poles. Suspending the boat like that gave us enough slack to be able to turn the boat over:

Damn but this is a nice looking boat (but I'm biased):

I had picked up some cheap used baby mattresses from the local thrift store to use as padding under the side of the boat. Should have gotten more though, since I didn't feel comfortable laying the gunwale down without any padding. So we left the boat semi-suspended for the night:

I made another shopping trip this evening for more mattresses. Tomorrow we'll finish laying the boat down on its gunwale, and then I'll get busy fairing the rest of the bottom hull half and preparing it for lamination.

Starboard settee and rudder mount

2008-08-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Last year when I installed the daggerboard case support web, I only taped the upper portion, thinking I'd wait to do the bottom until after I had rolled the boat to a more helpful position. I changed my mind on that and taped it upside down - lots of fun. Glad I wore glasses and a hat.

Next was the starboard settee; here it is set into position so I can tape the backside:

After all taping was done:

Here's the foam bed for the rudder mount:

I've decided to double the foam thickness after of the transom\aft-cabin, per the option described in the plans. I'm a big guy and I'd like the boat to be as strong as possible. Here I'm taping over a extra layer of foam that I glued to the lower portion of the transom:

I'll be glueing the rest of the double-layer later on. Also you can see the cutouts for the rudder mount in the picture above.

Trial-fitting the mount:

My levelling strategy worked great and was easy to adjust.

I first tacked the mount into position with a heavy layer of bog on the bottom of the mount, then let that cure (didn't want to risk it moving around while I was taping). Here's some of the mount taping:

I guess I could have done a neater job of taping, huh?

Finally, here's the rear deck all closed up and taped:

Doesn't seem like much for two days work, but I am really glad the rudder mount is in. I've also removed 90% of the remaining screws holding the hull to the battens. I'll finish that up tomorrow, but I think I'm now ready to remove the hull from the frames.

Fwd bunktop taped

2008-08-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

Last two days seemed to fly by. Great weather, but this means it gets warm in the tent (90+ deg F, easy). Call it my sauna weight loss program.

I made a mold plate for the fwd bunktop, out of scrap wood:

Here it is installed with all of the the taping done:

You can also see from the above picture that I've got my anchor well hatch cut out. Really makes things easier when you can stick stuff thru that hole.

Here's the fresh flanges\tape after the mold plate was removed:

The fwd bunktop glued and clamped in place:

The anchor well hatch makes it easy to setup for taping:

All taped and peelplyed:

Finally, I got up early this morning so I could laminate the lower port hull half. Tried to do it myself, but I haven't figured out a good way to manage the roll of glass as I'm working my way down the hull. Fortunately my daughter was home and helped my out - thx Cindy!

Almost done:

I plan to wait to laminate the bow until after I have the hull upright.

View from aft (glass is kinda moving up and down due to my difficulties in managing it, until I got my daughter to help):

Best of all, no bubbles! On the downside, I had planned to peelply the glass but it was warm enough that we just didn't have time.

What's this - actual boat work?

2008-08-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

Finally got out to the tent today. First I finally got my bow web glued in place; for some reason I forgot to take pictures of this - wait til tomorrow. Also taped in the upper (port) side of the bow web, along with glassing the inside of the upper bow nose. That's not a fun area to work in, very tight and I keep slipping down the gunwale.

Then I started fitting my daggerboard into the case. Here's the (not yet fully faired) board sticking out the top:

No sticking points anywhere, though the board feels a little bit sloppy (just a little) in the case. I'd rather live with that than a stuck board.

Here's the "A" daggerboard section traced out on the bottom of the case:

I then jigsawed out the bulk of the waste. First chunk comes out:

The poured-insert turned out pretty thick. All of the chopped glass I added to the mix settled to the bottom of the insert though.

Getting closer:

The hole turned out to be too small (I was worried it'd be too big), and I had to gradually enlarge it. I tried various tools but finally settled on a round rat-tail file. This was good for increasing the opening while keeping the curves nice and even. To be honest, there's not much left of the insert by the time you get to this point:

It looks like a nice fit, but I need to finish fairing, priming, and painting the board, then re-check the fit, before I can declare it done.

Lame excuse for an update

2008-07-17T21:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of updates guys. I have been working 6+ days week, 12+ hour days, for at least a couple of months now. Obviously my boat, along with most of my life, has come to a halt. But never mind my whining; here's some good news to ponder:

My folding system has just been shipped from Precourt; looking fwd to finally having that piece of gear.
Ian emailed me to tell me that I am now #5 in line on my beam order. Maybe by end of summer? Not that I need it right now...but I want these critical parts to be sitting safe in my living room, ready to go.
Roger Bonnot had an extra mast step fabricated and welded, and I managed to get first dibs on it; he sent mail today saying it was in the mail. Woot! It looks nice. I am very relieved that this opportunity came up, because I wasn't looking forward to finding a local fabrication shop and dealing with all that. Thank you Roger.
I am about two weeks away from a five week vacation. I will be visiting some distant family for a little while during part of that break, but otherwise this will be a 100% boatbuilding vacation. Time to get the show back on the road.

I still need to do some research on local anodizing shops; I know I toyed with the idea of getting my own anodizing kit, but decided I won't go that route unless the shop price is excessive.

I watched a movie with my wife the other night, but in retrospect that wasn't a good decision (although I loved it); I got lots of worried looks and comments like "are you sure you want to do this??". (Remember we haven't done any sailing before.) I need a counter-charm...anyone know a good movie that features calm seas, relaxed trimaran sailing, mai-tai sipping, etc?

The only boat work I've been able to squeeze in has been very minor, mainly getting the bow eye wrapped up in the extra layers of glass. It's not an easy part to wrap and I had to grind out some bubbles and re-do some parts a couple of times...maybe I should have tried bagging it. Anyway, it is just about ready to mount in the hull. I think I will be at work again this weekend so I will get to it when I get to it.

Where's Jay?

2008-06-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

Jay's been busy working - a lot. Hopefully I get to come up for air soon - bear with me. I *will* finish this boat and go sailing someday. :-)

Bow eye progress

2008-05-04T18:30:00.000-07:00

Long no time post. Work has been very busy; same old song, I know. Plus my mom came to visit for a week so I spent a bunch of time with her. (Hi Mom! :))

I've been doing little jobs here and there, trying to keep making progress but it's been hard. Here's the upper bow nose closed in; nothing pretty about this, just formed some foam around the bend (with a slot for the bow web), then bogged it into place along with some screws to hold it:

That long upper section on the foredeck is wastage, it was only there so I didn't have to deal with heat-forming a small short piece. I cut it off today and sanded it down even with the foredeck - looks good, but seems that I forgot to take a picture (next time).

Have started fairing the daggerboard also:

Looks good so far. I have not weighed it yes, but I'd guesstimate about 20-25 pounds at this point, based on feel.

I finished fairing the port lower hull foam, and also filled in all of the screw holes and plank gaps.

The bow eye is in progress. Here I am getting ready to mark the angle it should be placed at:

(Yeah I used trig to place the tape on the square; how geeky of me.)

Here I was figuring out fore-aft depth for the bow eye:

I am glad that I waited to make the bow eye, because the length specified by the plans will be insufficient if you add extra layers of foam to the bow leading edge (which I did). So I first figured out how long it needed to be , then glued up the rest of the bow eye (the triangular part). Here's an inside picture; I know, it's a bit hard to see anything but you should get the idea:

Yes the bow eye fit is a bit sloppy, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Makes me even more glad though, that I didn't spend days trying to construct the bow eye exactly as specified in the plans - I'd have ended up trimming and sanding it to fit anyway.

I still don't have any true "G" carbon, so I am making do with a lesser weight (9oz) which means I needed more layers around the front of the bow eye. Rather than use plastic for the temporary mold pieces, I used taped-over plywood. This is my bow-eye taping station, ready to go:

Doing the carbon on the bow eye wasn't too hard, but I did worry about compaction of the laminate in between the plywood - I used a popsticle stick, cut in half, to work it down in the crack but it was hard. This is the bow eye with all the carbon in place:

Finally, the extra "B" laminate for the bow eye has been placed in the hull, so I am ready to install the eye next chance I get.

Inching closer to frame takedown...

2008-04-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

Ok, so what got done this weekend?

Well, I taped the inside of the bow. That's actually more work than it sounds, since you're stretched out trying not to slide down the gunwale, while shoving wet tape up into a tiny space... But eventually I got it all done, and even peelplyed it.

Here's the test fitting of the trailer bow hook HD:

Once happy with the overall "fit", I bogged it into place with peelply on the inside to make taping later easier.

I decided to do the keel reinforcements before doing the final layer of "A" glass. That meant having to finish up the foam fairing around the keel, then back-fill the plank seams that weren't filled all of the way. Here's it all done, with peelply:

Yeah, the form frames are obviously shot for any future use. I keep whittling away at them whenever I need more space to do something.

Saturday morning I bagged on the first half of the second layer of "C" glass onto the daggerboard. Turned out pretty good. Unfortunately that operation used up the last of my vacuum bagging film, so I decided today to try to do a regular wet-layup on the second half, along the trailing and back edges:

I baby-sat it for quite awhile, making sure the glass was wrapped tightly around that edge. Let's hope it turns out ok.

Otherwise, I spent the rest of the weekend fairing foam and getting ready to laminate certain parts of the exterior. The deck (both main cabin and aft cabin) is all faired, and I also back-filled the plank seams. The lower hull half is faired but not yet back-filled. I decided that I'm not going to try to laminate over the gunwale, since getting the edge transition right will be very difficult to do while up in the air on a stepladder. I forgot how tedious it is to backfill all of the plank seams (easy, but tedious). Anyway, here's how it's looking right now (actually this was before back-filling the seams):

You can also see that I've pretty much got the bow leading edge all formed. I did end up glueing on a third piece of foam to the bow, but I'm not going to make it super-sharp; about 1/4-1/2" at the bottom leading edge, about like it was on my floats. Should be good enough.

I did not make further progress on the bow eye, since I decided I'd better get the bow leading edge nearly finalized, before trial-fitting the bow-eye.

Daggerboard support web and other stuff

2008-04-06T20:00:00.000-07:00

Not as much progress as I was hoping for today. I glued in the two inside layers of foam at the bow, but didn't tape it yet. The bog is all peel-plyed and it should be ready for taping next time I work on the boat. I also need to fit the trailer eye insert; I have two layers of HD foam glued together and curing, to form that piece.

I realized - a bit late - that I still had not made my bow eye, so that got started:

I glued the daggerboard support web into place, and taped it in on the upper side:

Here's how it looks from below:

The blocks are temporary of course, in order to make sure the panel stays level. No blocks on the daggerboard case, but the fit was tight enough that the panel didn't move while I was taping. You can see some flange glass for the fwd bunktop hanging down on the right hand side as well. I'm debating with myself whether to tape the support web from the underside now, or to wait until after the hull is upright.

I also bagged the carbon fiber on the other side of the daggerboard; next up will be bagging the second layer of C. This time I will bag\laminate it in two steps. Takes more time, but is less stressful. :)

I spent some time fairing the foam on the upper (port) hull half; I am reasonably pleased with the fairness at this point, but I know once I get started fairing for real (after exterior laminate) that it will be a big job no matter what. It is fun to see the hull lines start to emerge.

Spent some time staring at the upper bow exterior corner, trying to figure out how I am going to close it in. Next time I think I'll just grab some foam and thermo-form it into a nice curve and see what happens. Sometimes you can paralyze yourself with too much thinking.

I dry-fit the bow bulkhead into place and it looks like it will fit with little or no modifications - always a good sign that things are lining up well.

Finally, I submitted my order for the folding system parts (made by Precourt, but ordered through Farrier Marine), and also submitted my deposit for the beams. I see some wallet pain in my future...

Daggerboard work, bow closed in

2008-04-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

Last night I bagged the first layer of glass onto my daggerboard. I tried to do a complete wrap of the entire board; this is very hard to do and when I unbagged the board I wished I had it done it one side at a time. I had some "bunching" along some of the edges, but the worst part was a lot of bridging across sharp transitions (rebate edges, and the board transition from foil-to-flat). My overlaps were also a bit oversized. Well, no choice really but to cut and grind out the mistakes. Today I laminated and bagged the carbon fiber on one side and fixed the mistakes from last night at the same time. Here's the board ready for carbon; you can see the newly bare rebate edges:

Here's the carbon for one side:

I am having to work with two layers of carbon for each per-plan layer, since I could not find the correct weight. The lighter layer is only 4oz and I found this difficult to work with after it is wet-out; keeps wanting to twist on itself which is difficult to un-do with epoxied gloves.

After wet-out, the carbon forms quite a stack but it looks we judged the rebate depth just about right:

Originally I was planning to laminate and bag both sides at once, but I was using fast hardener and changed my mind and bagged it after the picture above. Tomorrow morning I'll bag the carbon for the other side.

I also spent time today working on the hull. I cut down both the deck and keel form frames, and removed all of the battens down to about a foot below the center line. I will admit there was some daydreaming going on today; staring at the emerging hull shape is pretty fun. I also did some preliminary foam fairing and so far it looks pretty good:

Here's the bow getting closed in:

According to the plans I can extend the bow out by one more foam layer if I wish; I'm going to fair it out first and see how it looks before I do that.

Last thing for the day was grinding out the bubbles on the deck stringer and then relaminating it. Man I hate having to do stuff over.

More hull taping

2008-04-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

The fwd beam bulkhead tape and uni is done, and the winch reinforcements are done. Tonight I taped the top and bottom of the daggerboard case. Lot of fun that was. Here's a crappy picture:

It's kinda chilly at night lately, so I let the lamps shine into the hull for an hour or so after I was done. You can see I also did the extra glass reinforcement behind the daggerboard case bottom. And, I actually vacuumed out the "floor" (gunwale) which made a big difference in appearance inside the hull.

I also did the cabin deck stringer lamination, but when I tore off the peel ply tonight, it didn't turn out so good - one edge lifted up on me (darn it, thought I had it stuck down really good). Will have to grind that and re-do it.

I still have to do the bow cleat reinforcements, but that's minor and can wait. The next big item for tomorrow is closing in the bow. I also hope to start cutting down the keel form frames so I can start the keel reinforcements.

No progress on the daggerboard; I'm just gung-ho right now to get the interior hull taping all done.

Given that today is April Fool's Day, I had half a mind to create a post describing how I decided to give up sailing and was buying a Chevy 327 to mount in the aft-cabin of my F22. Well I don't have the energy to write all of that, so you'll just have to imagine how funny it would have been. :)

Came home from work and my wife said she was reading my blog. Suprising, but cool; she said the blog was "cute". Honey, if you happen to see this: I love you!

Weekend progress and a visit to an F44SC project

2008-03-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a day for taping. The pictures are not much too look at, but I got a lot done: all interior taping along the hull seams is now done, including the bow compartment up to about 4" of the (as yet non-existent) bow bulkhead. Much of the taping was done using DBM1708 tape; this was my first experience with the stuff and I definitely appreciate its ease-of-use (especially back in the aft-cabin!) but have some reservations about how much resin it wants to swallow. Next up on the job list will be starting the daggerboard case taping, and closing in the bow.

For fun and a sense of progress, I also trimmed off the extra flash on the front of the aft-cabin:

I had posted a question about hull thickness for the front aft-cabin hatch on the F22 builder's forum, since the Lewmar hatches I was looking at (even their low-profile models) all specify 15mm minimum. I checked with Ian who said it's perfectly fine to add a ridge of foam around the perimeter of the hole to build up to that, so that's good.

For Sunday I had made arrangements with Allen (he's building F44SC #1, link somewhere on the right) to make a trip down to see his project. It is a not-so-secret plan of mine to build an F44SC someday and sail away, so this was an informative trip for me and and I also wanted my wife to see something in person to get a real idea of the size of this boat. The drive is about four hours long (ok, 3.5 if I'm flying low), so we left early and arrived around 10:30am. Then commenced a few fun hours of general and boat-related discussion, and a good look at Allen's hulls. Wow - having seen his lamination work up-close, I can definitely say he is doing a very, very nice job. Here's one of the pictures I took:

Thanks again Allen for letting me come by, much appreciated.

After getting home, I decided to do one more small job on the F22: making then glueing the cabin deck stringer into place:

It should be ready for final lamination tomorrow.

Cutting the daggerboard blank

2008-03-28T18:30:00.000-07:00

Regrettably I was pretty sick this week (with strep throat - zowie, haven't had that since I was a little kid!) so nothing new on the hull join work. My neighbor however finished the 3D CAD file for the daggerboard, and machined it today out of a solid cedar blank that I made up last August. I had been saving those pictures but this is a good time to post them I guess.

When I made the blank I went to Martin's Lumber in Everett and bought several pieces of very nice, very clear, Western Red cedar, in 2"x8"x8' dimensions. This is an expensive way to do it - the wood was well over $200 as I recall. After cutting them to a better length, I ripped them into chunks a little over 2" thick and got ready to laminate them all together.

I was worried about the glue joints ending up too dry, so I coated each joining side with raw epoxy, then slathered on a layer of bog for good measure:

After all of the pieces were glued together, I then clamped it all up:

After the bog dried, I "post-cured" it in a black garbage bag in the sun, but otherwise the blank just sat because the 3D file wasn't ready yet (hasn't been a huge priority for either my neighbor or me, obviously :). This month things were finally ready; here's a picture of the 3D model:

My neighbor first did a test board in MDF (which I test-fit in my daggerboard case) and today he cut the real board out of the blank. Here is a picture of the CNC machine in the middle of a rough-cut phase on the first side:

Here's a short video of the CNC machine in operation:

The audio isn't much :) but I think it's pretty cool to see the machine in action.

Here's a picture of the "finished" product:

Frankly it looks really beautiful; it's a shame it will all be covered up in glass, fairing compound, primer, and paint (I'm thinking of painting it yellow, for capsize emergencies). Anyway, next steps will be coating it with a sealing coat of epoxy, then starting the glass and uni layers. (And yes, we made sure to under-size the board to account for the thickness of the glass layers).

Hull joined

2008-03-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

Sometime in the middle of the week, I went ahead and glued my daggerboard case into the lower (port) hull half (my daggerboard is not ready yet and I decided not to wait). Yesterday I joined the hull halves. Everything went about as planned, however I was unable to get the fwd deck sections to come much closer than about 1/4"; I used Menno's technique and also tied straps over the upper hull half in an attempt to draw it down some more. In the end, I just cut some thin foam strips and bogged them into the gap.

Pictures of the hull joining are not too impressive, since there's not much to see. Here's the daggerboard case, keel-side view:

Forcing bog into the gap between the deck sections:

Bow section tied down:

Deck section joint with daggerboard case bogged into place:

After letting the hull joins cure overnight, I got started this morning sanding down all of the joints and getting things ready for taping. I forgot to put masking tape on the little wood blocks you see in the picture above; some of them were fun to remove (ie, grip the block with long pliers and twist it off). I got most of the joints ready for taping (everything except the lower bow section). I taped the outer transom areas, the outer cockpit join, the inside deck seam, and the inside keel section right behind the daggerboard case. Here's a picture from near the end of the day:

Climbing underneath the daggerboard case to get to the bow is lots of fun; on the other hand, it does make a nice work table inside the boat.

Oh yes, almost forgot: Stu from Bellevue came up and paid me a visit this morning; he's considering building a boat and we had a good time chatting about stuff. Thanks for coming by, Stu!

I've also been researching hatch choices. Lewmar's Low Profile series seems like it would be a good fit for the foredeck hatch. Their instructions say that the hull/deck thickness should be at least 5/8" (15mm) thick, which means it's not very suitable for the aftcabin fwd hatch (which is about 20"x20", mounted on 3/8" core). If anyone has a suggestion for the aftcabin fwd hatch, please email me.

Regarding Frontrunner fabric: I didn't try any Corsair dealers like Ian suggested. Instead, I called Lockfast (US distributor for Frontrunner) direct; I was able to buy some fabric however their minimum order is six yards. I went ahead and got it, but I'm hoping that some other builders might want to take some off my hands, cheap! :-) Let me know if you're interested - the color is "Koala", basically a light grey.

I'm gone on a business trip this week so I won't be able to do any boat work for awhile. Which is too bad, since I'm feeling very excited about being at this stage of the project (but it'll all be there when I get back).

Daggerboard case install prep and bow web installed

2008-03-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

I'm slowly marching closer to getting my two hull halves joined. The two big jobs that are left are installing the daggerboard case, and installing the bow web. I did most of the case install prep work this weekend, but I don't want to install it permanently until after I've finished the daggerboard itself and verified that it will work. (With the hull on its side in the form frames I won't be able to insert the board into the installed case because the tent walls are too close.)

Getting ready to install the daggerboard case is not too hard so I won't spend too many pictures on it. Here's the initial cut-outs, viewed from the keel side:

Case fit was excellent; was just the right length. Here's the dry-fitted case from the keel:

And from the deck:

I also got the bow web installed this weekend. I had rough-trimmed the bow area before, but now I needed the final precise cut. Here I'm getting ready to mark the cut line using the bow template:

After trimming both halves:

(In case you're wondering about that gap you see between the two halves; it's unfortunate, but I think I had some settling of the pier blocks under my strong back on the my first hull half (the upper one in the picture above). The gap runs aft to between form frames three and four; fortunately, the critical points (beam bulkheads) appear to have been unaffected. I have no choice at this point but to fill it in when I join the hull halves, and pray that my boat doesn't sail with a permanent lopsided tilt.)

After trimming the bow area back I then spent a lot of time staring at the bow web, being somewhat nervous about this important part. Like Menno I used a strip of foam between the web and the side of the bow, to help shim it up to the centerline of the boat. My foam strip needed to be much thicker than Menno's though; don't ask me why.

Here's a view from above:

Side view:

I tried to make sure the 3/8" rod (through the top of the bow web) was level, but most of my effort was spent making sure that the rod through the bow pole pivot was vertical and plumb. If that angle is wrong, the bow pole may point off at a weird angle and look funny.

Here's one more picture from the bottom:

Finally, this picture from inside shows my strategy for keeping the bow web in the right location; the 3/8" steel rod is stuck into a hole on the board, which is screwed to the top of the frames:

Well, that's that. Let's hope that I've installed it correctly.

In local news, I was happy to see that Fiberglass Supply moved their location from down near the Oregon border, to only about an hours drive north of me. I drove up there Friday morning to pick up some epoxy and carbon fiber; they seemed like nice folks. They did not have carbon uni in suitable weights unfortunately; I ended up ordering some from Soller Composites. I also had an impossible time trying to source PETP bushings online; I didn't try calling Johnson Composites (as suggested by Grant) but it turns out that Ian is selling them, so I'll just order some from him. The other item I'm trying to find is some Frontrunner fabric for the rudder case sleeve. I have not yet found a online retail supplier for Frontrunner; I might try calling Lockfast tomorrow to see if they'll sell me a yard or two.

Anchor well done, rudder started

2008-03-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the finished flange for the aft bunktop, that I did last week. Turned out pretty good, IMO:

I also finished up the anchor well blank. The outer laminate was easy to do. Right after I did the inner laminate, I used a simple jig to try to let it cure to the final dimensions as accurately as possible:

I'm taking a shot at constructing my rudder from foam. I vacuum bagged two 3/4" sheets together to make a blank; this picture shows the rudder blank with the rough outlines traced in, plus some HD blocks curing in front of it, and finally you can also see part of the trimmed-up anchor well off to the right:

Here's the HD inserts curing in the rudder blank:

I'm experimenting with polyurethane glue here for the first time. I can see it has some definite advantages, especially the foaming/space-filling ability.

Here's me wrapping the rudder insert with carbon fiber:

(Yeah, I grew a winter beard - it's a lot grayer than the last time I had one. My wife doesn't like it though; I may have to trade its removal for a new power tool or something. :))

All finished with the carbon wrap, but before peel ply:

I deviated slightly from the plans; my insert has two+ full wraps of carbon from top to bottom. This was mainly because I thought it would be easier this way than messing with separate pieces of carbon.

Wrapping the insert was easier than I expected. I coated the insert with bog before I started to wrap it, this seemed to help the carbon to "stick" to it. I also put two full turns of peel ply around it, followed by plastic, followed by duct tape in several places.

This morning after I unwrapped the insert (not much leverage for yanking on the peelply...had to use pliers to get a grip) I was very pleased with how the carbon stayed nice and tight around the insert. Here's the unwrapped insert sitting next to its home-to-be in the rudder blank:

Last, I used Grant's trick of using part of the scrap foam from the slot cutout as a spacer, to get the insert centered within the blank. I bogged the insert into place rather than use the poly glue:

Next steps on the rudder will be cutting out templates for the foil sections, then shaping.

Aft bunktop flange and anchor well prep

2008-03-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Back to boat building

2008-01-13T23:45:00.000-08:00

It took me longer than expected to get back to work on the boat. Was sick longer than expected, work was/is busy, the weather was cold and rainy, and we're doing a bathroom remodel. Last but not least -- I'll be honest -- it felt good to take a decent holiday break with the family.

Anyway, we had some decent weather today so I got a little bit of work done:

Felt good to be mixing epoxy again.

I was able to do some successful test squirms through the passageway under the cockpit, but wasn't convinced I could do it "for real" without accidentally kicking the bulkhead, or disturbing the tapes. So I only taped the front side, as seen above. After the front cures, that should help lock the bulkhead into place.

I hope everyone had a good holiday. It's been fun being the F22 spectator for a change. Menno, all I can say is: wow! Grant, nice job on the daggerboard - you've made it look easy and got me rethinking my choice of cedar.

Progress halted

2007-12-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately I have made zero progress these past two weeks on the boat. Had to put in bunch of extra time at work, and this weekend I've been knocked pretty low by a bad cold\flu bug. Even if I was feeling better, it's snowing right now, here in good old Bothell, WA, even as I type this:

Okay, I know this is nothing compared to what you folks in Scandinavia (or even Canada) get but we're not used to the white stuff around these parts. I told my wife this morning that if and when I ever build another boat, it will have to be in a heated indoor shop...

Starboard cockpit floor taped

2007-11-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Beam mount lower flange extensions

2007-11-24T23:30:00.000-08:00

Originally had planned to do more bulkhead taping work today, but it was cold enough that I chickened out and decided to work on the beam mount extensions instead, at least until it warmed up. Working on the beam mounts took a lot longer than I expected though and that's all I ended up doing today.

First up was finishing off the mold pieces. I essentially followed the plans, except that I still didn't want to drill any holes in my beam mounts (yet, anyway). The clamp-only strategy worked well:

The mold surface is still in two pieces in the above picture. I decided to leave them clamped to the beam mounts while bogging the "V" joint, so the parts would be accurately joined as possible. So I used masking tape to protect the mounts, then added the bog:

After a quick cure in front of the fireplace, I sanded down the mold surfaces til smooth and added (clear) masking tape:

I couldn't feel any "wax" on the surface of the beam mounts, but since this is such a critical area I decided to be extra careful: first a careful de-greasing\de-waxing, then a thorough sanding on the surfaces to be laminated against, then another de-greasing to help get all of the dust off. The attachment points on the beam mounts are as clean as I could get them.

Attaching a temporary block along the center-line of the mold surface helps hold it in the right location against the mount, until clamped down:

First layer of glass on the first beam mount:

I found 8" x 10" to be a good size to cut the "C" glass to -- big enough to cover the area without too much excessive overhang.

Starting on the uni pieces:

When I got to my third beam mount, I realized (or remembered?), that the four uni layers can be stacked and consolidated separately from the mount, then added to the mount laminate -- just seemed easier that way.

One more piece of peel-ply to go on the first beam mount:

Need lots of glass pieces for this job:

Finally all done:

Laminating all four mounts took me four hours -- I sweated over each piece of glass, trying to keep the glass\resin ratio as high as possible, given the critical nature of these parts. Tomorrow I'll trim them up and post some pictures of the results.

Starboard main cabin bulkhead taped

2007-11-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

Several things got done today. First, the main cabin aft bulkhead is now taped in:

Having to climb through the main hatch hole is a lot of fun now; haven't had to bend like that since my days as a circus performer (yeah right - but if I can do it, anyone can). The weather is still chilly so I left the main hull alone for the rest of the day so the taping could cure (don't want to risk kicking that bulkhead loose while it's still green).

Next was re-cutting the slots on the bow web. I did my best, but cured bog has a tendency to chip when being cut with a saw blade, so the job didn't turn out as neat as I would like. My neighbor (thanks Bill!) then helped me drill the holes. First we leveled the bow web as best we could: the tube is level, but the rest of it is best-effort by eyeball. I now have two reference points to use when mounting/levelling the web in the hull.

Check this drilling setup out:

That drill has a magnetic base; once the magnet was turned on I couldn't budge the thing at all - woof!

I am slightly nervous about the bow pole pivot hole -- it's in about the right place, but it's hard to locate the hole center from the FSP now that all of the glass is in place (plus, even this web is still a bit "chunky" - I'm not going to do it again though! :).

I also did the top flange extensions on the aft beam mounts. Here's the scheme I came up with to form the mold surface, without having to drill any holes in the mount:

I got both extensions laminated, here's one of them:

Finally, I also started making the mold pieces for the lower beam mount flange extensions and hope to get those done this weekend as well.

Starboard aft beam bulkhead taped

2007-11-22T16:15:00.000-08:00

My wife is just sooooo nice to me -- despite today being Thanksgiving holiday, she let me go ahead and do some boat work today. Just too cold outside to do much (woke up to 27 deg F/~-3 deg C this morning), but I did get the aft beam bulkhead taped:

That bright spot is a flashlight shining through from underneath, in case you're wondering. I used it to help locate the edge of the form frame.

After the beam bulkhead was taped, I did some more work on the new bow web (see previous post).

For fun, I dug up a picture to show what I was working on last year, on Thanksgiving 2006. Turns out that I layed my very first pieces of float foam that very day:

Looking at that picture, I'm struck by three things: first, how far I've come in one year; second, how much cleaner my tent was back then; and third, how much more room I had when doing the floats. :)

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone out there. Time for some turkey dinner and pecan pie, yum!

Bow web, take three

2007-11-22T16:00:00.000-08:00

I decided to produce another bow web. This is my third one, and I think I'm getting better at it. :) I delayed posting any details about it until it was basically complete, so I could get it all in one post. Much of this info has already been posted (on this blog or elsewhere), but I figured I'd write it all up since I had the pictures anyway. Hope it's helpful to someone.

New foam blank, with high-density pieces ready to glue in:

After tapering the upper portion of the web on the table saw, I glue the G10 tube on top (btw, make sure you sand the G10 til rough - it's smooth when new and I don't trust it):

After that cures, I sand it smooth and get ready for the initial wrap of C glass:

You can obviously tell where that piece of glass is going to go. Not shown but done at the same time as the above piece was the extra 3" piece of C over the tube.

Back when I initially started the project I ordered five yards of DB glass (w/o mat) from Noahs, thinking that this would be easier to use than rotating BD glass 45 degrees. The DB glass was a disappointment -- it was extremely fragile and hard to use; I would not recommend using it.

After that cures and gets cleaned up (stray glass cut or sanded away), it's time to do the rest of the bare edges. Here's the bottom wrap going on:

After applying peelply:

I've struggled to get glass to wrap and stick around curved edges like this. One thing that seems to help, is putting a very thin layer of bog over the curve and the nearby foam\glass, right before wrapping the glass around the curve. The bog seems to act as a nice filler layer between the previous layer and the new glass, helping it to stick nice and tight and filling in any potential voids.

Similar procedures were used to wrap the front and rear edges of the bow web - I use multiple narrow pieces of peelply on the sharply curved sections, since peelply doesn't stretch and conform too well in those areas.

I bagged on the straight layers of carbon fiber:

For my second bow web, for some reason I thought I had ran out of the "good" carbon fiber, i.e. the nice Hexcel product I ordered from Ian at the beginning of the project. So I ended up using a lighter weight of carbon fiber, which had to be tripled-up to get the minimum weight, which partially accounts for the chunkiness of that bow web. (I tossed out my first bow web attempt before ever getting to the carbon fiber stage. :) Turns out I still had some of Ian's carbon fiber hiding on a shelf; had barely enough left to do the rest of the bow web, but this did require some edge-butting, hence the narrow double pieces here:

Marking the location of the carbon fiber:

And curing in front of the fireplace after laminating and peelply are done:

If you look closely on the front two carbon layers, you can see that there are five layers there not four -- I had two short pieces of carbon left over, and decided to go ahead and use them on the web.

I really like how things cure nice and fast in front of that fireplace. Mom, thanks again for the candleholders; they're working great!

Here's how the web was looking at that point:

Next step was filling in between the layers of carbon:

After sanding that down, I was now ready for the final covering of C glass, this is the first layer:

Those stripes look kinda cool -- like a giant piece of candy or something. :) The two extra layers of glass over the nose ended up making it look a bit bulbous in that area - unavoidable, I guess.

After the whole web was done, it was time for slot-cutting. I decided to dado-cut the slots, using a jig I came up with:

There are actually two metal rods, one from each end of the web, spaced - in this picture - so that there is room to cut the biggest slot which I did first. They are attached to two wood blocks whose hole-centers are precisely 5/8" from the table saw surface (actually, they are the same blocks I used for making the bog-washers for the float chainplates). This setup located the G10 tubing parallel to the saw surface, with the tubing center 5/8" away, so to cut the specified 5/8" depth (below the G10 tube, into the web), I set the blade height at 1 1/4". It was more difficult to get the web vertical to the saw surface -- there are no "known" surfaces on the outside of the web, so I had to eye-ball that part.

After the last slot was cut:

Looking at the cross-sections is fun:

Next up is making insulating washers\layers (and sealing the foam) out of bog:

Tomorrow I'll re-cut the slots to size and then this job is done - will edit this post to add a picture of the final product.

Starboard bulkhead progress

2007-11-21T17:30:00.000-08:00

The weather really sucks - woke up to clear skies and a 31 deg F (~-1 deg C) morning, lots of frost on the ground, yadda yadda. All of my taping from yesterday was still quite green and tacky. Hard to get motivated to work outside at those temps. Makes me wish it would rain, since the cloud cover would help keep things warm.

Inspecting yesterday's tape jobs:

Forward beam bulkhead taped:

Upper rear aft cabin bulkhead taped outside:

...and inside:

Wanted to get the aft beam bulkhead done, but dark falls fast these days. Ah well, there's always tomorrow.

Starting starboard hull half bulkheads

2007-11-20T18:00:00.000-08:00

Regrettably, I had to work a huge number of hours last week and was unable to do any work on the boat. Then life (and getting ready for the impending holidays) caught up with me over the weekend, and I didn't do much then either.

Yesterday I finally started prepping the main hull halves for joining. I'll be honest - I'm nervous about how well my bulkheads will line up. To relieve my fears, I temporarily joined the hull halves together (using Menno's very nice technique - thanks Menno for figuring that out) so I could mark the exact locations of the bulkheads. This was also useful as a dry-run for the final joining, when I get to that.

So where am I at? I taped in three bulkheads today, plus the aft-cabin floor stub bulkhead. Here's the two fwd bunk bulkheads:

And the aft-cabin lower rear bulkhead:

It was comical trying to tape the fwd-most bunk bulkhead, when working underneath the other hull half like this. I'd slither up as far as I could go, only to start sliding back down on the gunwale in short order. Need to have Spiderman hands, I guess.

I also decided to make another bow web; it is turning out very nice this time. I'm going to finish it first, then post all of the details in a single post - should be ready in a couple of days.

Upper starboard hull half laminated

2007-11-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

I laminated the upper hull half last night -- it was a very cloudy day, which helped keeped the outdoor temperature reasonably high (low-mid 50's deg F). Working by myself, I started around 4:30pm and got done close to 10pm. Long night but I was glad to get it over with.

This morning I got to work checking for bubbles and sanding down the laminate. Overall it turned out well - a few small bubbles but nothing too concerning. Here's the new laminate, and a pile of sanding dust (my $(@)!@($* dust hose connector fell off the hose, and I can't get it connected again):

After patching the bubbles, I worked on trial-fitting the fwd beam bulkhead. That said, my plan has always been to lay the port hull half on top of this one so that I can get the bulkheads lined up exactly. Since the weather was nice today, I figured I might as well get the port hull half moved back in side the tent. Fortunately my neighbors were once again willing and able (thanks guys!) to help out. My wife was home this time and took a short video clip of the action:

The fit to the starboard hull half is overall extremely good . There is however a large gap between the fwd deck sections, I am not sure what caused this; maybe the hull deformed slightly while sitting in the back yard? (Ah, the trials and tribulations of a backyard boat builder.)

A tent-ful of boat (anyone want to buy some sawhorses - cheap?):

A view from the inside:

Tomorrow I'll fine-tune the placement of the port hull half, and get started marking bulkhead locations. Should be fun, crawling around inside of there.

One more thing: my rudder web is very nearly complete, and is turning out very, very nice. (IMO, of course). Here I'm putting on the extra two layers of carbon fiber on the lower gudgeon:

And this is after vacuum bagging on the uni-glass on both sides of the web:

Earlier today I laminated on the extra layer of C around the lower gudgeon, all that is left now is the cosmetic glass around the gudgeons.

Upper starboard hull half planked

2007-11-04T20:00:00.000-08:00

Poor me -- things are busy at work and I didn't touch a piece of foam all week long. :-)

Mid-way through upper hull battens and planking:

This is how it looked after I finished up for tonight:

This is a bit of a minor milestone - I'm done with the foam planking, after four float halves and two main hull halves. Hopefully I'll have time to bog between the planks this week, then laminate first thing next weekend.

I thought I did a good job on the rudder gudgeons last weekend, but after taking a closer look at them it turned out that I didn't trim them very square to the tube. I could make them work, but I figured I wouldn't be very happy about it. So yesterday I made two more gudgeons - my third set, in case anyone's counting. Here's the method I figured out for trimming them:

Have to be careful not to extend the steel rod too far, so the blade doesn't cut into it (didn't happen to me, I'm just mentioning it). This worked much better, I was very pleased with how they turned out.

Glueing the gudgeons onto the foam web:

Next is laminating a layer of C all over the web. On my first bow web (side note: I've done two bow webs, and am thinking of doing another after seeing the nice svelte one on Oliver's boat; mine is kinda chunky) I remember I tried to wrap a gigantic piece of fiberglass all around the entire web. It didn't work very well and Ian's recommendation was to piece several sections around the web - it is perfectly fine as long as you have good overlaps. Here's the first section of C on my rudder web:

The two rectangular pieces of glass went over the gudgeons themselves. I didn't finish covering the entire rudder web yet.

I also poured my daggerboard case keel insert this weekend. I left one spacer in the case as per the plans, and stuffed a long vinyl tube down from the top until it was about 3-4 inches above the bottom:

Rather than place the dry glass at the bottom of the case, I mixed in chopped glass into my resin before pouring it down the tube (either option is fine according to the plans). I dropped down to using medium-speed hardener so that I'd have plenty of time to pour, and to reduce the chances of excess heat. The procedure went very smooth and I now have a nice slab of cured resin at the bottom of the case. By the way, the case is nicely balanced and will stand up by itself on the floor. Also, I weighed the case - came in at 19.4 lbs (8.8kg).

Now that I'm done planking, it raises the question of what will I do with all of the scrap foam I have. After spending a fortune on the stuff, I hate to just throw it away - but I don't want this stuff sitting in my shed forever. Some other builder - one more patient, economical, and cost-conscious than me - could save a bundle, if they were willing to do some work. Anyway, if you're local to the Seattle area and are interested, send me an email. I have one full sheet of A550 3/8", three 1/4 sheet of A1200 3/4" (way over-ordered there), three 1/2 sheets of A500 3/4", and a mixed-up ton of smaller A400\500\550 scraps. Scraps are especially good for flat panels IMO.

Lower starboard hull half laminated

2007-10-28T21:30:00.000-07:00

Another busy week gone by - man but the holidays are coming up fast. Temperatures are dropping too, woke up this morning and it was barely over freezing.

I didn't have much time to work on boat stuff earlier this week, but did manage to get the plank grooves bogged and the marine plywood for the keel strip mounted. Then today I laminated the lower hull half. As mentioned before, I am now pre-wetting the foam before I lay the glass down:

That looks like an awful lot on there, but I found that laying down a thick coat makes the glass wet-out much easier. Here it is all done:

I also joined my daggerboard case this weekend on Saturday morning. Here I'm just getting started:

End view:

First two layers in place on aft side:

Initially there was a little bit of looseness in the middle of the case join, because I couldn't clamp it right away. After I had all three layers in place, I peel plyed the middle section, held it together, and clamped it once and for all:

Here's the uni glass going on:

Now with everything all peel-plyed:

I brought the daggerboard case inside the house and put it in front of the basement gas fireplace to cure (and turned up the thermostat on the fireplace). Things cure nice and quick this way, although it does heat up the whole house quite a bit (I hope noone asks why the dog is drinking so much water now :)). This meant I had time to do the other side of the case in the same day. Unfortunately I ran out of peelply, which meant that Jay the manly boatbuilder had to accompany his wife to Joanne Fabrics in search of a substitute. The store had no exact replacement, but a light-weight rip-stop nylon seemed to come closest, so I got some of that.

Putting the third layer of glass on the fwd side of the case:

After finishing up the fwd side, I put it in the basement and was expecting to pour the keel insert today. Unfortunately, a huge section of uni and regular BD glass lifted up for some reason:

I don't understand how this happened - I know I smoothed everything down really good before quitting for the night. Nothing for it but to trim off the hanging, useless glass, and grind it all back down. Here's the area post-repair:

These pics are getting a bit redundant, but here's one more showing most of the joined case:

I also vacuum bagged the carbon fiber layers onto the gudgeons; unfortunately, the vacuum pressure caused the carbon to bunch up over the tube on both of them -- I checked with Ian, and he said that I needed to re-do both parts, and to not bag them because this is apparently hard to do without getting the bunch-ups. So on Saturday, I also did two new gudgeons in my mold. Today, I hand-laminated on the carbon fiber to the gudgeons and cured them in front of the fireplace:

Later I trimmed them...

...and trial-fit them on the rudder mount foam:

Didn't have time to glue them on though.

And the winner is....

2007-10-22T19:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks everyone for the responses in the "What do you think of Jay's blog?" poll. Allow me to record the results here for posterity before I delete the poll itself:

"It's perfect keep it up" -- 26 responses (89%)
"Less talk, more pictures" -- 2 responses (6%)
"Less pictures, more talk" -- 0 responses (hey I can dream, right?)
"Shut up already and just build the darn thing!" -- 1 response (3%) (ok, who's the wise guy? :)

Taking a poll was a bit silly, but cheap fun. I'll do my best to keep up the level of detail, and even start adding more pictures to satisfy the two of you who marked "more pictures". These Blogger-based blogs come with a free gigabyte of photo storage, and I've only used a little more than half. So there's plenty of room for more! :-)

I've now finished planking the lower hull half and lower gunwale:

Next up of course will be dremeling the grooves between the planks, bogging them, and preparing for laminate.

Overall I think my gunwale lines are going to turn out much better this time; mainly because I followed the advice in other build blogs (and someone also sent me an email - thanks all) to run one side of the foam farther down, and then just butt the other edge into it. Much easier than scribing, and should make for less bog\lighter weight. Here's what I mean:

Last but far from least, I had a heart-stopping moment after getting home from work this afternoon. Looking outside from the kitchen window, I saw that the rearmost three or four sawhorses under my port hull half, had collapsed! Ack! My daughter went outside with me and helped me set it all back up. The aft 1/3 of the hull was basically holding itself up -- the hull is remarkably stiff. Not that I want to put it to the test anymore. If I was doing this again, I think I would try placing the hull half on concrete blocks sitting on the ground (levelled of course); the wind would have much less of a chance to get underneath that way.

And yes, I did have the hull tied down per the friendly advice I received -- we had a minor wind storm warning last Thursday, which made me get off my rear and get it done. Don't know why the sawhorses decided to slip now.

Starboard planking progress

2007-10-21T20:30:00.000-07:00

Made slow progress this week, due to work committments -- was getting home after dark most nights. So much for my boasting about hardly missing any days working on the boat. :) As of Saturday morning, I only had about three feet of lower hull planked. This is where I'm at now:

Only about one more foot to go on the lower hull. I'll keep working at it this week. My goal before I quit working outside for the winter is to at least get this hull half planked and laminated, move the port hull half back into the tent on top of the mold, and maybe start doing bulkheads. Getting the hull joined this year probably won't happen, I think.

I am starting to get into winter "small project mode". Earlier this week I was puttering around in the garage trying to put together a rudder gudgeon mold. Not that I need it right now, it just looked kinda cool and easy to do. Yesterday I finished the mold; here it is with the G10 tube and inner foam piece in place:

I left the inner foam piece somewhat high, about 1 1/4" instead of 1". My mold is 1 1/2" high (two 3/4" layers), but this isn't a big deal. The foam piece is held securely by a screw through the backside of the mold. My neighbor helped out with his drill press again to do the hole for the G10 tubing (thx Bill).

Here is the first gudgeon, partway through laying down the multiple layers of A glass:

During the unmolding:

After unmolding:

Obviously it needs to be trimmed and cleaned up, before the carbon lamination can be done.

My second gudgeon broke loose from the tube during unmolding...

...giving me the opportunity to do another one - but once you have the mold, you can do one of these in about ten minutes. The third one came out out of the mold just fine, and I now have two gudgeon blanks ready to go.

I probably shouldn't be playing with this rudder stuff, when I have other jobs left undone (like joining my daggerboard case). But it was quick, easy, and fun, so oh well.

About ready for starboard planking to begin

2007-10-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Not a lot of progress today - was hampered by a fit of laziness, induced by the fact that it is my birthday today and my wife was baking goodies for me :-).

Here's the reversed frames after mounting, but before battens:

And this is where I left off:

As I've mentioned before, my form frames are plywood because I was worried about water absorption if I used MDF instead. I've found that although plywood does not swell up and disintegrate like particle board or MDF would, it will still take on a warp under moist conditions. I was fighting this today by screwing stiffeners onto my frames to try to remove some of the warps. This is a big deal, since virtually every single measurement you do will be taken off of a form frame. If I had to build outside under these conditions again, I think I would try MDF, but would seal every inch of the outside surface of the frames with epoxy (after cutting them to the FSPs) before use. Might get the best of both worlds that way.

Port hull half unmolded

2007-10-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

Wasn't able to do anything on the boat after work yesterday, so first job today was to finish removing all of the foam screws. When it was all done, I had two large buckets of screws and washers:

I then started working on getting the hull half popped loose. I don't remember exactly how long this took me, but it feels like it was at least an hour, maybe two. I had initially thought that I could run some lines from the peak pole of the tent, and use them to pull it out:

But this didn't work -- just couldn't get enough grip on the line I guess, and it was nylon so it was stretchy. (Probably if I had tied the line to a ratchet it would have worked.) I went back to the trial-and-error way, pushing and pulling here and here, looking for spots that were still stuck. The access hole by the transom makes a great pulling spot, and this was the area that popped loose first:

Next I put my sawhorses in the back yard, layed 2'x4' pieces of wood across them:

This is about the flattest part of my yard (except for where the boat tent is). I did my best to get everything level, using shims under the sawhorse legs; it's not perfect, but I think it will be good enough. Especially since I plan to get the starboard half done as quick as possible.

Now I was ready to completely unmold the hull half, and lay it on the sawhorses. Fortunately all of the neighbors were around today and willing to help. Sean\Bill\Scott\Jim -- thanks a ton guys! I couldn't have done this without you! Unfortunately, no one was available to take pictures of the moving process. Too bad, there would have been some good shots.

We didn't have much of a strategy -- we just pulled the hull half straight up as far as we could get it, then turned it over almost inside the mold, with the deck rotating under. This was all done by hand - no lines or tackle or gantries. Once we had it turned over, we headed out the back of the tent. Here there were some minor difficulties -- scraping the top of the hull half against the tent door flap, then scraping against the oak tree that's right behind my tent -- but in less than five minutes it was all done.

Grant asked me about how stiff the hull was. I thought it was very stiff, and during the move I never saw any serious deflection of the hull shape. I had lots of help on hand and was glad I had them due to the constrained space I had to work in. I'm not sure two people would be enough unless you had lots of space to move around in, and overhead lines to hoist the hull half where possible.

Anyway, here she sits:

(Yeah, I need to throw some more support under the transom area.)

And:

And:

Me underneath the hull half (feeling very excited:) ):

Then I tarped over the hull, using bungie cords to tie it off underneath:

The only thing I'm worried about is that if we get a good wind storm it might get under the boat and blow it off the sawhorses. I could tie it down with some stakes in the ground (or use the stairs and the apple tree :), but we're not really into the windy season yet - so for now I'll just keep an eye on the weather and work as fast as I can on the other hull half.

I then spent some time doing cleanup work in the tent. This is partway through the cleanup, which is why stuff is sitting or hanging on the mold; you can get a feel from this picture how much clearance we had to work with between the top of the mold and the tent door flap (and the oak tree branch):

Last job for the day was taking down the form frames. I thought this job would last into tomorrow, but I was able to surprise myself:

Tomorrow morning I'll start setting up for the starboard hull half.

Cheekblock plate studs mounted

2007-10-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

Last night I put a small amount of fairing compound around the cheekblock hole in the daggerboard case. This was so that I could sand it down today to produce a (reasonably) flat surface for trial-fitting the cheekblock plate and its studs.

The plans say to "tap" the studs into the case side, and since I always take things very literally I actually went and borrowed a tap from my neighbor and experimented with it on some scrap glass. Well, it didn't work so well. But when I drilled a simple, slightly-undersized hole and just screwed the stud into it, that worked pretty good. I don't think it's a real robust tap, but it should be okay so long as you don't screw the studs in and out too often.

So then I marked the holes, drilled them by hand, and mounted the studs:

This was not quite the best way to do it, since trying to drill a perfectly perpendicular hole by eyeball is futile - I ended up having to relieve some of the holes in the plate to get it to fit. Eventually I got it all working, and had everything trial-fitted:

Each stud in the picture above has a nylon washer, flat washer, lock washer, then the acorn nut -- all done per the building manual. The metal parts are all 316 stainless steel. (Can you tell I've been busy shopping at McMaster?)

Here's what it looks like from the inside:

I'm happy with the results - it looks good and feels very strong.

Finally, here are the studs mounted for the last time, bedded in sealant:

I used 3M 5200 Fast Cure. I used only about 1/300th of the tube, but the instructions warn that the entire tube will go hard within days after opening, even with the cap on -- if true, what a gyp! :-)

I think I am now completely ready for joining the two case halves.

I also spent around two hours this afternoon removing screws from the battens to get ready to unmold the port hull - got more than halfway done. Unmolding could happen possibly as soon as Saturday, but by Sunday for sure. I hope my neighbors are all planning to stay home this weekend, and not doing anything too terribly important. :)

Beam mounts arrive and cheekblock plate progress

2007-10-09T22:30:00.000-07:00

Beam mounts came in the mail today. Woo-hoo! Now I just need a joined and laminated hull to go with them.

They came nicely packed:

Here are the fwd mounts:

Another view where you can (kinda) see the slot:

Here are the aft mounts:

And another:

The pictures above didn't turn out as good as I hoped -- there's so many interesting angles to these things, that there's really no substitute for touching and handling them in person. They feel nice and solid -- lots and lots of glass in these things!

I was excited last night thinking that I'd be able to start joining the daggerboard case halves today. However I forgot about doing the studs for the cheekblock plate -- can't skip that step :). After drawing out the outline of the plates and marking the location of the holes, I asked my neighbor (thanks Bill!) for some help drilling the holes on his drill press. Here we've punched the hole locations and are about to start drilling:

The small block-shaped outline to the left, is a spacer that will go between the block and the cheekblock plate. Probably by coincidence, the glass in this area of the daggerboard case turned out almost exactly 1/8" thick, so I can use the same aluminum sheet for the spacer.

After we drilled the holes, I brought the blank back to my house. Here I'm jigsawing the parts out of the blank:

Many jigsaw blades gave their lives for this part. After cutting and whittling away at the metal for awhile, then some sanding to clean it up, it looked like this:

It's not quite done - needs more rounding-over on the edges, plus buffing and polishing - but this is good enough that I can use it as a template to mount the screws\studs inside the case. The plans say to "tap" the glass for the studs, but I'm doubtful that the glass will tap that well - I will practice on some scrap glass first.

Daggerboard case anti-fouling

2007-10-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

After work tonight, I put two coats of anti-fouling on my daggerboard case halves.

This stuff is 50% solid by volume (75% by weight). I'm always amazed at how a seeming liquid can separate so thoroughly:

The picture above only shows the tip of the iceberg. After a minute or so, I gave up trying to re-mix it in the original can, and dumped it into a plastic bucket -- had to scrape the sides and bottom of the can to get most of the copper sludge out. Once it was all in the bigger bucket, it was much easier to mix it all back together.

So...would your wife let you apply anti-fouling in the living room? Mine does - guess I'm lucky -- though it does have a bit of a stink to it. She also lets me store boat parts here, as you can see:

After the first coat:

Then I cranked up the thermostat on the gas fireplace, to assist in drying this coat. I'll have to stay up late in order to get the second coat on, but it'll be worth it: tomorrow night I should be ready to start joining the two halves into a daggerboard case.

Almost ready to unmold the port hull half

2007-10-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Slow progress this week -- wasn't able to touch the boat from Wed-Fri unfortunately due to work committments. And yesterday morning -- wonderful $^*#!? timing -- my router went belly-up, necessitating several hours on hold waiting for Verizon tech support to work thru the issue. I feel the days slipping away...

As others have commented, the builder's update that Ian sent out recently was full of great information. The part I cared about the most was the daggerboard case cheekblock details. Nothing was unexpected once I saw the sheet, but now I felt confident enough to proceed with the case construction. I couldn't find a Ronstan 1709 cheekblock as suggested by Ian, but the RF40151HL model looks like it will work. Here it is sitting next to the hole in the case:

Note that Ian specifies that the cheekblock plate be anodised. I've been looking online for a Seattle metal finisher that can do this type of work...there are several, but they all look like heavy-duty industrial outfits. Perhaps I may try to do it myself (there are many DIY kits available, e.g.: http://www.caswellplating.com/).

I have decided to paint the upper interior portion of the daggerboard case with Alexseal 2-part LPU, and the lower interior portion with a copper-based anti-fouling paint (Pettit Copper Bronze). After ten coats of fairing compound...just kidding! :-) No fairing compound at all - yesterday I brushed on three coats of Alexseal primer, and today I sanded it all down smooth (nothing extravagant, just to 320 grit and I didn't try to fill any holes) then setup my sprayer and put on two coats of paint. It's not perfect but should work okay:

The sterndeck has been taped in place:

And:

I also worked on forming the flange for the cabin settee, using the settee itself as a mold plate. I wanted to try wrapping peel ply around the settee edge (after wrapping it with masking tape)...

...to form a nice ready-to-glue surface. This didn't work so well, because peelply is stretchable - as I was dragging the popsicle stick over it to try to form the fillet, scrape up excess bog, etc, the peelply kept bunching up and moving around. In retrospect, I should have scraped everything off and started over. The resulting flange will probably suffice, but the glass didn't lay flat against the settee in many places, and I had a hard time pulling bunched-up peelply away from the cured bog. The flange looks lumpy-and-bumpy all over. I don't think I'll try this again.

I also spent a few hours today in the hull sanding down all of the tapes:

Peelply would relieve me of having to do this, but as I've discussed with others I find peelply somewhat difficult to use while taping. In tight spots especially, it's hard enough to get the tape to lay nice without disturbing the fillet too much, let alone when you add peelply on top of it. I do have a good case of the itches tonight though. :)

I briefly tried to tape the aft compartment under the aft cabin bunktop, but it turned out to be a nightmare of a job. I couldn't even get fillets formed, working with long sticks, and didn't even get to the point of trying to force glass down into the cracks. Not yet sure what I am going to do about this -- might give up and let it be.

With sanding done, and the settee flange and the sterndeck done, I'm now pretty much ready to get this hull half unmolded. My plan for this is to set up sawhorses in the back yard, lay lumber across them, level them as best I can, and lay the hull on them. I hope this works - my yard isn't all that flat. But I don't really have an alternative plan.

I had forgotten to re-tarp my floats (out of sight, out of mind) and didn't notice until today. They've been getting a good dose of Northwest weather:

I opened a couple of hatches and everything looks dry so far.

Finally, Ian sent me an email to let me know that my beam mounts were sent out air-mail on Friday.

Aft bunktop taped (mostly)

2007-10-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

From Sunday I had the aft bunktop all ready to go. I taped the outside edge and the fwd enclosed section of the bunktop, and decided to leave it alone at that point. This is because I had a feeling that I would probably dislodge the bunktop out of position if I started poking sticks down into the aft enclosed section; it's a very tiny space.

Here's a view looking forward:

The rear corner of the fwd compartment:

And an outside view:

I think pre-forming the flanges with a short mold plate might have made this an easier job -- I know the taping would have turned out better too. Obviously I won't have a choice but to do that for the matching side in the starboard hull.

As you can probably tell from my complaining above, this was not an easy taping job. Perhaps not as bad as doing the interior float bows, but still hard. Well, there's nothing like a little humiliation to bust your bubble, when you start to think you're getting good at this stuff. :-)

I also dry-fitted the stern deck piece this evening; looks like an easy one to do. Haven't got around to dry-fitting the cabin settee, that's also coming up.

I see Ian commented on the F-boat forum that the first batch of F22 beam mounts should be shipped soon. I ordered mine back in May, but haven't complained about the delay since I didn't need them yet. It will definitely be exciting to get my hands on those parts; I will post some nice pictures when they get here.

Transom taped

2007-09-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

Today I only got a few things done: taped underside of cockpit floor to aft cabin bulkhead join, placed and taped the transom (I did get it bagged last night), and spent a lot of time trial-fitting the aft cabin bunktop.

The transom is interesting because the plans specify that it be canted 5 degrees forward, instead of just in parallel with the form frame. To accomplish this, I clamped a batten parallel to the edge of the form frame, and dropped the plumb bob down from the end of it, hanging over the hull. By measuring how far the plumb bob was from the angle point, I could use the Law of Cosines to determine far the point under the plumb bob had to move, in order to rotate the batten onto a 5 degree angle. Here's a picture of the setup:

This was taken after the batten was rotated from right to left and is already in the final position for the transom. There's probably easier ways to accomplish this placement, but this seemed to work out okay. Then it was taping time:

I didn't know about or even remember the Law of Cosines -- I was just pretty sure there'd be some piece of trig magic that would work, but it took about fifteen minutes of hunting around on Wikipedia to to finally find it. :-)

Also, you can see that I've left the transom full-width, rather than cut it down the middle. I wish I could do that with all the bulkheads -- frankly I'm not looking forward to making the bulkheads match up, during hull join.

After the transom, I worked on trial-fitting the aft cabin bunktop. This took awhile because for some unknown reason, the bunktop center line was higher than the hull center line by about 1/2" - another unexplained mystery:

After more fitting I trimmed the center line down and I think it's just about ready for taping:

I also already routed the fwd edge of the main cabin bulkhead where it meets the bunktop, so there's a nice gentle curve there.

More port bulkhead taping, part 2

2007-09-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

Since last post, I've continued work on taping port hull bulkheads. Here are some pictures to show the progress.

Aft cabin stern upper bulkhead:

And:
Cockpit floor:

And:
I used a router to put a nice curve on the bottom leading edge of the cockpit floor, you can kinda see it in the picture above.

Yesterday I taped in the fwd bunktop. Unfortunately, I started the job off with an Oaf Moment (tm): I placed the bunktop in position, slid my jigs against it but didn't clamp them down, climbed into the hull (this was fun, squeezing between the jigs), and started bogging and filleting the long outer edge against the outer hull. Did around five feet of fillet before running out of bog, started climbing out of the hull, and ... kicked the damn bunktop with my foot, knocking it out of position and ruining the entire fillet. Lesson learned: always clamp bulkheads in place before starting to fillet - don't just trust to "I'll be careful".

Here's some shots midway thru the bunktop taping:

And:

See the handle of the blue scissors in the picture above, off to the left? I use them for trimming wetted-out pieces of tape, that end up too long. They were once a very nice pair of scissors, now they're gunked up beyond belief.

Here's the area between the rear bunktop bulkhead and the fwd beam bulkhead; this was a tight area, and I'm proud of how it turned out:

Not that anyone will ever see it again, after the hull halves are joined. :-)

Fitting in a strip of foam to fix the gap up by the bow:

And now all taped over:

This was taken today, as I was inspecting the tape job:

Here I'm contemplating how I'm gonna tape the inside bottom of the aft cabin front bulkhead (it feels mighty roomy in there!):

The outside of the aft cabin front bulkhead:

Here's the inside:

You can see that I haven't yet taped the edge next to the cockpit floor; this is because they didn't quite line up perfectly (don't ask me why - stuff happens), and so I am going to wait for the other tapes to cure so I can neatly trim it before taping it.

Finally, here's the little aft cabin bunktop support bulkhead:

I was disappointed to discover that my bulkhead collection in the basement did not contain a ready-to-go transom...so I've got a foam blank (with the h/d insert) curing for that now, and might try to vacuum bag it tonight before bed. I did have the stern deck pieces done from earlier this year though. Tomorrow I'll also try to get the cabin settee flange done -- I'm not going to glue the settee in place until after the hulls are joined, since I have a suspicion that I'll be needing the extra manuevering room.

Well, that's enough boat stuff for now -- we're off for some pizza.