More Epoxying

Cathy came through for me one more tine as we applied 2 coats of epoxy to the boat today. Looks good! Its amazing how pretty the okume plywood is with just a clear coat of epoxy!

I will work on the wing tips next as I give the boat a couple of days to fully cure prior to flipping it to work on finalizing the wing structure.

Lots Accomplished!

The past few days I have gotten a fair amount of different tasks accomplished. I stopped by the lumber store and picked up some Mahogany, Poplar and Cedar so that I can start working on the gunwale trim, the wing tips, and the trim pieces for the wings. I had never used Cedar before and I was amazed as to how light it was compared to the board of Mahogany that I bought! I have a good friend of mine at work that does a lot of woodworking and he compared it to being a notch above balsa wood! (A little exaggeration, but not much!). I spent a fair amount of time milling and ripping the wood into the required dimensions and ended up emptying my shop vac a couple of times from all the sawdust generated from the milling operation required to get the wood to the correct thickness. Its great to have the right tools for the job!

Next step was to glue up my wing leading edges blanks. I ended up making a composite of Cedar and Poplar for the main portion. My intention was to use strictly Cedar, but the piece I purchased was not big enough and Home Depot was a lot closer than Woodworkers Source. In order to make the 40mm thickness I ended up gluing a 19mm piece of Cedar to two 11mm pieces of Poplar (Yes thickness planing an 18mm piece of Poplar down to 11mm makes a lot of sawdust.

 I let it set overnight and this AM I used the joiner to clean up the epoxy and true the face of the wood for the second glue up operation. I measured the thickness of the glued up beams and noticed I it was 43mm thick, therefore, I used the joiner one more time to reduce the thickness to 40mm.

Next step was to glue on the Mahogany nose piece and let it set up.

After keeping my wife happy by taking care of some much needed yard work I decided to tape up all the  seams on the deck. In Dudley's instruction he has you taping up the wing and deck seams, doing a bunch of additional work, then coming back and doing the nose and sloping panel seams. I decided that I might as well knock them all out at once. My goal is to let the epoxy set up and then put a couple of coats of epoxy on the deck surface prior to flipping it over and working on finishing the wing.

Layout Out the Fiberglass Tape

Seams Taped and Epoxied

Since the temperature is finally dropping around here I went onto System 3's website and ordered the fast hardener for their laminating epoxy. When I ordered the epoxy from Dudley he had recommended the slow hardener due to the extremely hot weather we have here in the summer time, but after all was said and done I really did not work on the boat in the heat of the summer so I really should have ordered the fast hardener. Live and learn!

Starboard Wing Deck and more

I cut the new wing beam down to the correct size, put a couple of coats of epoxy on it and installed the starboard wing deck without any fuss.

I clipped out the zip ties and finished filleting the gap between the sloping deck and the wing deck. Once everything dried I went through and removed all staples that I had used to hold the decks in place while they where setting up. That ended up scarring the wood a little bit around the staples as I had to somewhat dig them out. No worries though since there will be no bright work on the deck and I used a little epoxy filleting material to fill in the holes!

I also went ahead and started to sand down the fillets that along the deck/sloping deck interface and also the upper deck to start getting it prepped for the installation of the fiberglass tape along the two deck seams. I am spending a little time on this since this is going to be visible and I don't want void under the fiberglass tape. I also added some extra filleting material to the rear starboard portion of the stern transom to fix a small issue of "Squareness"

Tomorrow it will be time to sand some more!

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.

Port Sloping Deck

This morning I tackled the installation of the port sloping deck. I went ahead and clamped the board to the wing beams similarly to the starboard one. After everything was trued up I decided to set my long level on the inboard side of the wing beams to check for trueness. Much to my surprise I found out that even though everything was nice and true at the outboard side, one of the "floating" (as in not attached to a bulkhead) wing beams needed to be trued up on the inboard side also. I did this by adding the level/clamp combo as shown in the picture.

Of course I figured I better check the port side and much to my dismay I found out that one of the "floating" wing beams was out of alignment! So - out came by handy little backsaw and I cut the glue joint out! (In the process I also managed to do a number on my finger nail! ouch!) Tomorrow, once the port side is all nicely set up, I am going to grab all my clamps, board, etc and fix this errant wing beam. I am glad that I checked this ahead of time. It could have turned into a real mess if I found out the problem as I was installing the wing deck panels.

As far as I can tell the root cause of most of my alignment problems has been the extremely bendy nature of of 4mm plywood and its propensity to warp. My next boat project (The Aviateur) will be made out of 9mm plywood. I'm hoping not to have similar problems on that particular project!

While I was at it I also filleted the backside of the stern mound and added a couple of small pieces of plywood to the bow of the boat to fix another interesting alignment problem where the gunwales are about a 1/4 inch higher than the bow transom.... (I did notice that another builder had this exact same problem...)

This afternoon I went ahead and put the first coat of epoxy on the wing deck panels, and on the inside of the stern mound. I was going to finish up the dagger board, but decided to forgo the sawdust bath (Apart from that the afternoon heat did not provoke me to go out there and sweat!)

Dagger Board

While the starboard side panel was setting up I decided to tackle the dagger board. It was pretty much the same drill as the rudder with the exception that it was wider and longer which required more time behind the table saw and more time behind the belt sander / long board sander.

I did have to get my Dad's old HP 11c scientific calculator to do a little math to figure what the ultimate length needed to be so I wouldn't cut too much off the "blank" when I was cleaning up the edges.

I got the

leading edge on both sides planed/sanded, now I just need to go and tackle the trailing edge.

I was surprised to find out that all those little kerfs make the hardwood extremely sharp to the point that it permanently marred the painted finish on my table saw! (A little bummed about that).

I did notice that the dagger board has a slight bend in it. I'm going to do a little research online to see how to best fix that. I'm thinking that I just need to get the bend to relax long enough to let me put the fiberglass/epoxy on it. I'm pretty certain that once that is on there it will keep the shape.

Sloping deck and stern mound

Today I installed the starboard sloping deck panel. I decided to do the starboard & port side separately since I wanted to make sure that the wing beams where correctly lined up prior to the installation, and I only had the one piece of straight poplar that was long enough to do the job. Nothing to exciting to report as it actually was pretty straight forward. I drilled matching holes on the deck / sloping deck panel and loosely zip tied them together ahead of time.

I applied a good coat of epoxy on the bulkheadsand stringers and then laid the deck on it. I stapled the panel onto the stringers and cleats, and then tightened up the zip ties. Tomorrow I will do the port side.

Since I had plenty of time I also went ahead and started work on the stern mound. It took a little sanding to get everything lined up, but it should look pretty good. I guess those scuba weights can come in handy once in a while!