Port Wing Decks

This afternoon I decided to tackle the installation of the wing decks. I started by taking out by taking the hull out of the garage and into my driveway so that I could blow out all the dust etc with the air compressor prior to the final step of closing in the hull. Afterwards, I removed all of the zip ties tying the sloping deck to the deck, sanded the fillets, filleting the areas by the zip ties, filled in the zip tie holes and finished by filleting the sloping portion of the forward section of the sloping deck panel to the hull. I also went ahead and epoxied the stern mound in place. Once this was done I drilled the holes for the zip ties on both of the wing decks and sloping panels and epoxied the port deck to the wing beams.

I then turned my attention to the starboard wing beams to try and figure out the solution to my one wing beam misalignment issue. I thought I was going to be able to re-align the existing beam and epoxy it back to the starboard sloping deck, but no matter what I tried it was not going to work. Looks like even with all the care I took with the my long level back when I installed them, the weight of the level acting on the bendy plywood caused it to be at an incorrect angle once I took the level off and the hull sprang back. Once I figured that out I decided to cut it out and install a new one.

Good news is that my harbor freight vibrating saw that I picked up for $50 a while back came in super handy and paid for itself by being able to cut out the wing beam without damaging the hull and without any theatrics. All I had to do was put the blade flat against the hull and let the saw do its job. I cut both the inboard and outboard sides out and then popped out the pine wafer that was left and I was back where I started! Pretty nifty tool!

I went ahead and epoxied a new beam in, making sure to double check the alignment with two sets of levels! (Cathy is doing a fine job of modeling it for me!)

Tomorrow I'll put a couple of coats of epoxy on the new beam prior to installing the starboard wing deck.