Beam mounts arrive and cheekblock plate progress

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.