Preparing for beam mount installation

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.