Chainplates laminated

Friday evening I laminated some glass around the upper portion of the chainplates. Reviewed the results on Saturday morning and it was clear it did not turn out so good; I had relied on peel ply to hold things in place and apparently didn't wrap things tight enough - lots of bubbles resulted. (The job Tor did on his chainplates looked great. Anyone else notice that how cool looking his Christmas-color-theme carbon\fiberglass is? His boat will be stunning even before he paints it. :) I ended up sanding down much of the glass on the chainplates to remove bubbles but decided to move ahead with laminating them into the floats, since this was a key step that needed to be done before the float decks could be glued on, and I'll be adding more glass later anyway.

So Saturday was the day for gluing the chainplates into the floats. First my son helped me get both floats on their sides:

I had already done prep-sanding on the existing laminate, so next was making sure the flange holes were big enough and marking the location of the chainplate:

(The plans call for the chainplate to be installed at a 84 degree angle. This is tricky to measure even when you're just doing a dry-run, and it's the last thing you want to mess with when you've got epoxy mixed and you're under the gun. I did my best to get the angle right while marking the location of the chainplates. I hope that if I am a degree or two off, it won't cause a critical failure. Makes me feel lame to even say that -- such are the pathetic hopes of an amateur boatbuilder. :) )

Finally, it was putty and laminate time:

The weather was warm enough that when the fillet putty started to kick, I got lots of fumes and heat coming from the fillets. Tried to capture some of that in a picture, but none turned out.