Spinnaker Guide Beam and other things

When I got off work on Friday afternoon I stopped by the lumber yard and purchased $250 worth of cedar and poplar planks in order to get ready for the next project: The Spars! I also ordered some more thickened epoxy glue from System 3 since I was about out, along with three self mixing tubes of the stuff for the mast project! My though on the self mixing tubes is that even though the stuff is pretty expensive, it will make a tough job a lot easier since summer is coming and the pot life on the epoxy gets a lot shorter! I also ordered the slow hardener for the regular epoxy for the same reasons!

Once I the plans unloaded from the truck the next step was to trim the excess off the bow rub rail and to sand it to shape. Dudley's dimension of 32 mm wide did not work out due to the fact that the rub rails on the gunwales are also 32mm and are sloping downward at an angle relative to the bow transom, therefore, keeping them at the same dimension would leave a fairly visible portion of the bottom part exposed. Therefore I made it wide enough to cover the bottom of the gunwales rub rail. Once I started trimming the sides I also noticed that the bottom of the bow transom needed to be shaped to match the angle of the gunwale rub rails if not there would be a very noticeable angle point at that location. Anyhow, not as straightforward as it first appears but nothing too complicated either.

Once Finished with that I ran the router with a 1/4 round bit along the whole entire rub rail to smooth it out. Next step is to build the spinnaker guide beam.

For this next step I had some leftover cedar and mahogany that I cut down to size and then ran it through the thickness planer. The plans call for it to be 100% cedar, but I figured the lamination of the mahogany & cedar would be a little bit more interesting. I cut and located the temporary center support as indicated and laminated everything together making sure to cover everything with wax paper. I did notice that in order for everything to lay down correctly you really had to have the clamps on the forward side of the hull on the rub rail. When I first put it together one was forward the other was aft, and it was not laying down correctly. Luckily I caught it prior to everything setting up.

I'm letting the whole thing sit for a few days for a couple of reasons: Firstly there was a fair amount of resistant for the wood to bend at that angle and the whole thing is under some tension. Secondly after last weekends heat spell we ended up with a cold rainy weekend where the temperatures did not peak over 55 degrees. So I'm thinking two solid days of setup time is necessary to make sure the epoxy does not creep when I let the whole thing go!

Next steps will be to trim it size, cut the rabbits in the side of the hull, sand it, epoxy it and voila! Assembly finished on the hull and time to more onto the spars!