Cockpit drain holes

Although I was tempted to just glue my cockpit seats on so as to maintain the visible forward progress, I bowed to others' wisdom and decided to paint out the cockpit compartments first. Note: although I am not trying to win the "Best Little Cockpit Compartments in Texas" competition (that honor will go to Ed), I do want things to be smooth enough that blindly sticking a hand in there will not result in any scratches from errant fiberglass spikes. So I first sanded things down, then applied a thin layer of my Alexseal fairing compound:

I have been thinking of trying a home-made fairing compound; the Alexseal stuff cures really hard and is difficult to sand. Isn't that what micro-balloons are for, to make an easy-sanding mixture? Unfortunately I still have a few gallons of Alexseal left to use up, and there's no way I'm wasting that expensive stuff!

I am really kicking myself for not cutting out the drain holes in the cockpit seat fronts before taping them in place. One reason I was thinking that it would better to do this post-taping was because the extra cockpit deck foam would would need to be taken into account. I should have just done the drain holes anyway, but made them 3/8" higher! I think (deep-down) I was simply postponing a simple job so I could get immediate visual gratification by taping the seat fronts in....bad habit for a boat builder. Long story short, I got to spend some time today carving out some drain holes. First I used a Rotozip to get the rough outline cut open, then I used the Fein Multimaster to smooth out the entry from the cockpit deck. Digging the foam edges was a bit tougher, but I found that a paint can opener tool (with the little hooked end that goes under the edge of the paint can lid) worked well for this, in this little space. Here's the port drain hole; you can also see the external drain hole:

It would have looked much cleaner if I had done this before bulkhead install, but I'm confident I have sufficient drain capacity, per the plans.

The foam edges of all four drain holes have dug out and filled with bog.

I was not looking forward to sanding inside these compartments; my Festool RO125 sander is too big to work well in these spaces. I tried using an old Makita orbital palm sander we had in the garage, but that thing was so torquey that it was hard to manage. I treated myself to a new Festool DTS 400 sander after work today:

The new sander really worked well, and the dust collection is (as before) very nice. Merry christmas to me...!

When I was in the aft cabin this past weekend, I got a chance to examine my rudder web taping job. It's not...pretty. I cut some scrap pieces of foam-cored laminate into the shape of the rudder web access holes, and will glue them to a couple layers of A glass to form a flange (same thing Menno did for this bow bulkhead access hole), so that this area can be covered up.