Getting back into the swing

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". :)