Almost ready to unmold the port hull half

Slow progress this week -- wasn't able to touch the boat from Wed-Fri unfortunately due to work committments. And yesterday morning -- wonderful $^*#!? timing -- my router went belly-up, necessitating several hours on hold waiting for Verizon tech support to work thru the issue. I feel the days slipping away...

As others have commented, the builder's update that Ian sent out recently was full of great information. The part I cared about the most was the daggerboard case cheekblock details. Nothing was unexpected once I saw the sheet, but now I felt confident enough to proceed with the case construction. I couldn't find a Ronstan 1709 cheekblock as suggested by Ian, but the RF40151HL model looks like it will work. Here it is sitting next to the hole in the case:

Note that Ian specifies that the cheekblock plate be anodised. I've been looking online for a Seattle metal finisher that can do this type of work...there are several, but they all look like heavy-duty industrial outfits. Perhaps I may try to do it myself (there are many DIY kits available, e.g.: http://www.caswellplating.com/).

I have decided to paint the upper interior portion of the daggerboard case with Alexseal 2-part LPU, and the lower interior portion with a copper-based anti-fouling paint (Pettit Copper Bronze). After ten coats of fairing compound...just kidding! :-) No fairing compound at all - yesterday I brushed on three coats of Alexseal primer, and today I sanded it all down smooth (nothing extravagant, just to 320 grit and I didn't try to fill any holes) then setup my sprayer and put on two coats of paint. It's not perfect but should work okay:

The sterndeck has been taped in place:

And:

I also worked on forming the flange for the cabin settee, using the settee itself as a mold plate. I wanted to try wrapping peel ply around the settee edge (after wrapping it with masking tape)...

...to form a nice ready-to-glue surface. This didn't work so well, because peelply is stretchable - as I was dragging the popsicle stick over it to try to form the fillet, scrape up excess bog, etc, the peelply kept bunching up and moving around. In retrospect, I should have scraped everything off and started over. The resulting flange will probably suffice, but the glass didn't lay flat against the settee in many places, and I had a hard time pulling bunched-up peelply away from the cured bog. The flange looks lumpy-and-bumpy all over. I don't think I'll try this again.

I also spent a few hours today in the hull sanding down all of the tapes:

Peelply would relieve me of having to do this, but as I've discussed with others I find peelply somewhat difficult to use while taping. In tight spots especially, it's hard enough to get the tape to lay nice without disturbing the fillet too much, let alone when you add peelply on top of it. I do have a good case of the itches tonight though. :)

I briefly tried to tape the aft compartment under the aft cabin bunktop, but it turned out to be a nightmare of a job. I couldn't even get fillets formed, working with long sticks, and didn't even get to the point of trying to force glass down into the cracks. Not yet sure what I am going to do about this -- might give up and let it be.

With sanding done, and the settee flange and the sterndeck done, I'm now pretty much ready to get this hull half unmolded. My plan for this is to set up sawhorses in the back yard, lay lumber across them, level them as best I can, and lay the hull on them. I hope this works - my yard isn't all that flat. But I don't really have an alternative plan.

I had forgotten to re-tarp my floats (out of sight, out of mind) and didn't notice until today. They've been getting a good dose of Northwest weather:

I opened a couple of hatches and everything looks dry so far.

Finally, Ian sent me an email to let me know that my beam mounts were sent out air-mail on Friday.

Aft bunktop taped (mostly)

From Sunday I had the aft bunktop all ready to go. I taped the outside edge and the fwd enclosed section of the bunktop, and decided to leave it alone at that point. This is because I had a feeling that I would probably dislodge the bunktop out of position if I started poking sticks down into the aft enclosed section; it's a very tiny space.

Here's a view looking forward:

The rear corner of the fwd compartment:

And an outside view:

I think pre-forming the flanges with a short mold plate might have made this an easier job -- I know the taping would have turned out better too. Obviously I won't have a choice but to do that for the matching side in the starboard hull.

As you can probably tell from my complaining above, this was not an easy taping job. Perhaps not as bad as doing the interior float bows, but still hard. Well, there's nothing like a little humiliation to bust your bubble, when you start to think you're getting good at this stuff. :-)

I also dry-fitted the stern deck piece this evening; looks like an easy one to do. Haven't got around to dry-fitting the cabin settee, that's also coming up.

I see Ian commented on the F-boat forum that the first batch of F22 beam mounts should be shipped soon. I ordered mine back in May, but haven't complained about the delay since I didn't need them yet. It will definitely be exciting to get my hands on those parts; I will post some nice pictures when they get here.

Transom taped

Today I only got a few things done: taped underside of cockpit floor to aft cabin bulkhead join, placed and taped the transom (I did get it bagged last night), and spent a lot of time trial-fitting the aft cabin bunktop.

The transom is interesting because the plans specify that it be canted 5 degrees forward, instead of just in parallel with the form frame. To accomplish this, I clamped a batten parallel to the edge of the form frame, and dropped the plumb bob down from the end of it, hanging over the hull. By measuring how far the plumb bob was from the angle point, I could use the Law of Cosines to determine far the point under the plumb bob had to move, in order to rotate the batten onto a 5 degree angle. Here's a picture of the setup:


This was taken after the batten was rotated from right to left and is already in the final position for the transom. There's probably easier ways to accomplish this placement, but this seemed to work out okay. Then it was taping time:

I didn't know about or even remember the Law of Cosines -- I was just pretty sure there'd be some piece of trig magic that would work, but it took about fifteen minutes of hunting around on Wikipedia to to finally find it. :-)

Also, you can see that I've left the transom full-width, rather than cut it down the middle. I wish I could do that with all the bulkheads -- frankly I'm not looking forward to making the bulkheads match up, during hull join.

After the transom, I worked on trial-fitting the aft cabin bunktop. This took awhile because for some unknown reason, the bunktop center line was higher than the hull center line by about 1/2" - another unexplained mystery:

After more fitting I trimmed the center line down and I think it's just about ready for taping:

I also already routed the fwd edge of the main cabin bulkhead where it meets the bunktop, so there's a nice gentle curve there.

More port bulkhead taping, part 2

Since last post, I've continued work on taping port hull bulkheads. Here are some pictures to show the progress.

Aft cabin stern upper bulkhead:


And:
Cockpit floor:

And:
I used a router to put a nice curve on the bottom leading edge of the cockpit floor, you can kinda see it in the picture above.

Yesterday I taped in the fwd bunktop. Unfortunately, I started the job off with an Oaf Moment (tm): I placed the bunktop in position, slid my jigs against it but didn't clamp them down, climbed into the hull (this was fun, squeezing between the jigs), and started bogging and filleting the long outer edge against the outer hull. Did around five feet of fillet before running out of bog, started climbing out of the hull, and ... kicked the damn bunktop with my foot, knocking it out of position and ruining the entire fillet. Lesson learned: always clamp bulkheads in place before starting to fillet - don't just trust to "I'll be careful".

Here's some shots midway thru the bunktop taping:

And:

See the handle of the blue scissors in the picture above, off to the left? I use them for trimming wetted-out pieces of tape, that end up too long. They were once a very nice pair of scissors, now they're gunked up beyond belief.

Here's the area between the rear bunktop bulkhead and the fwd beam bulkhead; this was a tight area, and I'm proud of how it turned out:

Not that anyone will ever see it again, after the hull halves are joined. :-)

Fitting in a strip of foam to fix the gap up by the bow:

And now all taped over:

This was taken today, as I was inspecting the tape job:

Here I'm contemplating how I'm gonna tape the inside bottom of the aft cabin front bulkhead (it feels mighty roomy in there!):

The outside of the aft cabin front bulkhead:

Here's the inside:

You can see that I haven't yet taped the edge next to the cockpit floor; this is because they didn't quite line up perfectly (don't ask me why - stuff happens), and so I am going to wait for the other tapes to cure so I can neatly trim it before taping it.

Finally, here's the little aft cabin bunktop support bulkhead:

I was disappointed to discover that my bulkhead collection in the basement did not contain a ready-to-go transom...so I've got a foam blank (with the h/d insert) curing for that now, and might try to vacuum bag it tonight before bed. I did have the stern deck pieces done from earlier this year though. Tomorrow I'll also try to get the cabin settee flange done -- I'm not going to glue the settee in place until after the hulls are joined, since I have a suspicion that I'll be needing the extra manuevering room.

Well, that's enough boat stuff for now -- we're off for some pizza.

Trial fitting more bulkheads

Been having fun getting more bulkheads ready to tape, and I thought the trial-fit details might be useful. I've been working the last couple evenings on the fwd bunktop, cockpit floor, and the aft cabin stern upper bulkhead, and I think they are about ready for taping.

Here's an aft view of the fwd bunktop being dry-fitted:

The fit from that view looks great IMO. However, I did somehow end up with a screwup near the bow:

Seeing this was quite depressing -- where did I make a mistake? Bow battens? Bunktop cutout? Who knows? So I fired an email off to Ian describing the situation and he sent the following reply which I thought was worth sharing:

[This is] not unusual, as it is very hard to always have a good fit, and particularly in bows which are hard to draw on the computer. Just fill in gap with a foamstrip or bog and tape over. These are not unusual problems in boat building particularly with hulls - it is not a precise science yet.

That made me feel somewhat better -- just have to keep moving along.

Here's one more bunktop dry-fit view:

The cabin settee has to wait for the fwd bunktop to be taped, so I moved next to the cockpit floor. After some very minor trimming to get everything squared up and vertical, it was looking like this:

And:

And:

It's hard to tell from these pictures, but when I sighted along the bunktop and the cockpit floor, they looked nice and parallel, as they should be.

Finally, here is the aft cabin stern upper bulkhead:

And from the other side:

Some of these arrangements could benefit from more positive retention, but I think they will be okay as long as I'm gentle while taping (once you've got them bogged and filleted into place, they tend to stay put). After they're taped in place and the jigs are removed, I'll re-check them all with the level and see how good a job I've done.

Tip: if you have a straight bulkhead horizontal or vertical edge that just needs trimming by a half degree or so to be true, a flat sanding block works great - more control than the electric sander.

Finally, since the weather is getting colder lately, especially at night, I've moved all of my epoxy resins into the Great Carpeted Hot Box (aka my office). This makes my office a bit cramped, but I've lost more resin in the past than I want to admit, to excessive crystallization. (Yeah I've used the hot water bath trick before but the crystals always seem prone to reappearing, once they've shown up.)

More port bulkhead taping

I made good progress today, spending about ten hours outside in the tent working on bulkheads -- got the fwd beam bulkhead, both front bunk bulkheads, the main cabin bulkhead, and the aft cabin stern bulkhead, all taped in. And my aft beam bulkhead from yesterday turned out great - finished curing in perfect alignment.

First was the fwd beam bulkhead. Here's all the tapes for this bulkhead (both sides) ready to be cut out:

With the exception of the temporary ones, all tapes were cut double-bias. DB tape is a pain to work with (always wants to shrink in one direction, and elongate in the other). At first I tried carrying the wet tapes out to the tent as one long piece, but this doesn't work so well -- it's best to roll the tape up for transport, then unroll it as you place it over the fillet.

Here's the fwd beam bulkhead taped in place (except for the temporary tapes, I added those a bit later):

Fwd fwd bunk bulkhead (this gives you a good idea of my strategy for holding the bulkheads in place too):

Temporary tapes added to fwd beam bulkhead:

Like yesterday with the aft beam bulkhead, I hope that's enough "tacking".

This is the aft fwd bunk bulkhead, getting an initial bogging on its foam edge:

The bog in the picture above is supposed to be just enough to fill the space between the hull and the bulkhead. After positioning the bulkhead in place and clamping it down, I would then form fillets...

...and then lay down the tape:

The main cabin bulkhead was about the same as the others, but slightly more challenging due to its size (plus the fun of clambering into the hull over the deck side). When doing the fwd-side tapes, I brought my taping wet-out board into the tent to minimize the number of times I'd have to climb in and out of the hull:

Here is the fwd-side of the main cabin bulkhead after taping:

I did not apply tape to about 5" below the deck, nor above the bottom drain hole, to allow for minor adjustments when joining the hull halves later.

The last bulkhead for today was the aft cabin stern bulkhead; I won't show any more pictures of taping since it's all the same after awhile. Here's some pictures though, that show the hull is rapidly starting to fill up now with bulkheads:

And:

Pretty cool, eh? Still a lot to do though, before I can even think about unscrewing this hull half and popping it out of the mold.