Beam mounts bogged in place

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!