More cockpit work

I've decided to move ahead with the cockpit compartment plan in my last post. Here's one of the new bulkheads in place:

You can also see where I drew a line around the bottom edge of the cockpit seat, so I'd have a guideline for constructing pre-formed tapes if necessary - which it will be for the two aftmost compartments, unfortunately.

Safety compartment bulkhead set in place, along with both hatch holes cut:

Cutting the exterior hatch hole in the picture above made me a bit nervous, but I think it will look okay:

I moved the placement of the safety compartment from port (where it was in my plan, last post) to starboard after very careful consideration. Namely: I'll normally be towing the boat in the right-hand lane most of the time, and with the safety compartment on the starboard side passing drivers won't be able to see it. :)

Here I'm working out the placement of the hatch for the semi-dry compartment, and the access hole for the wet compartment:

One of the hatches set in place:

And voila, all the holes are cut:

There's no real guidance in the plans for how far away from the beam bulkhead any access holes should be. (Yes there is a warning about drain holes, but I don't think that's the same as an access hole). So I just used my best judgement, helped along by reassurance by some pictures of other boats with a similar arrangement.

As mentioned, several of my cockpit compartments require pre-forming of tape flanges. I hate having to make these, and I bet I'm not the only one: they just never look as good as tape that was laminated in-place. So I tried to be creative and come up with a way to make a flange that wouldn't end up looking like a dog's breakfast:

It's just a short piece of pine, with the top edges rounded-over, and a couple of screwing flange supports attached. The supports don't extend all the way to the front so I have room to smooth the tape out against the hull side. I'm not sure it was worth even this little effort, but it didn't turn out too bad:

See that white stripe thing extending across the top of the flange\tape? I didn't cover that portion of the mold with masking tape - duh. Such an idiot. Good thing I removed the mold while the tape was still green, or it would have been a real mess.

One more picture of my flange-making efforts:

I won't do pre-made flanges for the compartments that are open to the cabin interior, but I've decided to do complete flanges for all the other compartments. I just don't see how I could do a very good job of taping while working through the two access holes, even if the boat was inverted.

I'm getting excited about glueing on the cockpit seats, but I have almost decided to first do some (rough) fairing, priming, and painting of these compartments while I still have good access to them. It will be just impossible to do any quality work on them later through the access holes.