Taping the Bow Transom

After some confusion on my behalf as to how far I should run the fiberglass tape up the Bow Transom (Which stemmed from my first not so good attempt described in my previous post) I initially decided to run the tape on part way up. This uncomplicated matters somewhat and allowed me to get a decent taping of the nose. Today, after some research which involved looking at build photographs from Dudley's pages and other pages I decided to run the tape the rest of the way up. Next step is to flip the hull and start working on the deck supports and the wings

Flip the hull again!

Well it was time to flip the hull so I could cut out the dagger board slot, round off the forefoot and tape the chines and the bottom of the hull. As usual what I originally thought was going to be a fairly straight forward job turned into quite the learning experience! First I bought this nifty tool from harbor freight that has this cool oscillating blade that cut through the plywood like it was butter! (A big thanks to another PJ 14 Builder) Of course, in my enthusiasm I got it a little close to the edge of the dagger board casing and nicked a small portion of it. No worries since I will be adding some spacers to align the dagger board and the nick should get covered up and faired. Next step was to round off the forefoot to the 50 mm radius - that went pretty smooth!

With the hull flipped I took out all the screws that I had used to keep the stringers attached to the hull while it was setting up and broke out the filleting epoxy so I could fill all the plethora of holes that had magically appeared in the hull since it was last upside down (mainly the stringer screw holes and holes that I used for the zip ties to keep the bulkheads in place while filleting them to the hull). I also added filleting material to the center line of the hull at the forward section. That way I could get it all sanded down to a nice straight line and take out any irregularities. Finally I added some material to the bow to take out a low spot that occurred during the hull attachment process. After a good sanding it was ready to to start laying the tape. This is where the true fun began.

Yesterday I taped the chines and the bottom of the hull. Everything went well until I had to wrap the tape around the forefoot and up both sides of the bow transom. The issue I ran into was that I could not get the tape to lay down flat on the bow transom and it kept popping up. I thought I had finally gotten everything kosher until I got up this morning and inspected it. At which point it was pretty clear that tape had not laid flat against the transom and had creating an air bubble. So this afternoon when I got back from work I got the heat gun out and took the whole mess off, scraped it, sanded it, and tried again... No luck same issue, pulled the wet tape off... tried again...Same bad luck same issue, took the wet tape off... Finally after a lot of head scratching it occurred to me that the fiberglass tape did no like to make multiple sharp corners and that it was most likely the root of all my problems. Out came the sanding block, and after a good 10 minutes of sanding and shaping I tried again. This time Success! I guess the bottom part of the bow is meant to be rounded! Went ahead and laid to sets of tape one on top of each other. They ended up being slightly uneven, but not to worries, it will even out during the fairing process! Looks like I might have to buy some more 2" fiberglass tape to finish the boat! Definitely wasted a bunch on this particular project!

Fillets, Fillets, and did I Say Fillets?

Well I have been somewhat busy adding the fillets to all the bulkheads and stringers on the inside of the hull. This was a fairly monotonous task especially since it required mixing up new batches of fillet material on a regular basis. I took a suggestion from another Paper Jet 14 builder and put the material in a zip lock sandwich bag which helped immensely with the application process.

I also went ahead and fiberglass taped the inside of all the chines of the boat and cut out the compression posts for the mast and glued them in place. I wanted to get this done prior to adding the last fillets on the back bone in this area that way the posts would lay flat against the bottom of the hull. Just need to fillet this area and fill in a couple of holes and it's time to flip the hull so that I can add fiberglass tape to all the outside seams!

Turn That Boat!

Big day today! Went ahead and glued the stringers down with a combination of epoxy glue and screws to hold everything down while it set.

I promptly followed it with that milestone event in every boat's life - The hull flip! Very exciting stuff. Cathy and I turned it over while my daughter took pictures / video

Filling the Holes

Boat was put on hold over the weekend as we went down to Mexico for a nice relaxing trip! (As you can see the Kayaks have yet to be put away!). Interestingly enough while we were down there somebody had a Laser out in the ocean - Definitely made me look forward to completing this project and taking it sailing!
Between last week and this week I removed the zip ties from boat. It as a fairly easy process with the exception of the two zip ties at the forefoot of the bow that did not want to come off. One of them will most likely be ground off when the bow gets rounded. The other I just filled in with fillet material. I did find that the fillet material has a definite working time until the container gets super hot (as in literally smoking hot) and becomes toast. It took 2 batches to fill in all the holes - I made the 2nd batch slightly smaller and spread the fillet material in a thin layer around the inside of the cup so avoid excessive heat build up - That seemed to work. I anticipate one more time with the fillet material to fill in any other small craters after I sand the bumps of this coat.

Let's try this Again!!

Today was a big day for the boat! I attached the side skins on without too much theatrics! For the most part everything went smooth with the attachment, and I have it on and epoxied in place. I had a little bit of a challenge finguring out how to hold the front part against the bow transom since the clamps kept sliding off. I ended up cheating and drilling some additional holes through the side panels and the bow transom and using zip ties. I figured it worked well for the rest of the boat, therefore, it should work well here. There was a small gap at the bow transom where the side skin met the bottom panel which I could not get rid of no matter how much force I put on the zip ties. The good news was it is small enough that the epoxy fillet material filled it in without too many problems.

Talking about the epoxy fillet material... Today I learned that my handy dandy electronic scale that I bought from Cabelas only goes up to 100 g. I found this out as I was weighing the part A and B of the epoxy. Nothing worse than your scale going blank as you are part way adding the second part of the epoxy. I made the decision to toss the whole batch and start again - The fillet material is what initially holds the hull together prior to taping it, and I figured it was not worth having a bad batch of epoxy screw things up. Unfortunately for me the story does not end there. During the whole issue of messing up the 1st batch I accidentally hit the units button on the scale to the point where I had the exact same problem happen again (I thought it was reading 50 grams, but what it was actually reading was 50 dwt (dont ask I dont know) which was pretty darn close to 100 g... and so I had to throw out the 2nd batch! Luckily third time is a charm!!

Now I'm going to wait a good 2 -3 days to let the whole mess set up prior to removing all the zip ties and proceeding with the next step.

It's beginning to look like a boat!!!

O Crap Moment # 2

Ok so if you look at the sequence of pictures you might suspect that something is backwards - well they are not. Couple of interesting things materialized once I attached the side panels. Firstly there is a specific reason as to why the saw horses are located where they are on the plans, and just randomly screwing them to the frame where they fall does not necessarily work! I found that out when I attached zip ties to the bow and saw the huge bow in the wood where it was conflicting with the horses. So after unscrewing the horses and moving them back I tried again. This time everything went well until I got to the point where there was a joint in the side panels. At that point I noticed a 1/2 inch offset between the holes on the side panels, and that on the bottom sheet. Now, Sam @ Third Coast warned me that this was going to happen and I took extra care to mark the panels as I cut them out, but somehow I was not careful enough and must have mis-marked them (I suspect I sanded off the markings when making the grove for the tape and them mislabeled them). When I took them off the boat and stacked them on top of each other, it was plain as day that one was longer than the other. A quick emergency trip to Home Depot and $60 later I had a heat gun in hand to see how well I could take these apart without destroying them! Set the gun to 500 F and amazingly enough the fiberglass tape peeled right off! After a little sanding I began the progress of joining them all over again. And yes, this time I put both panels on top of each other to make certain they were the right length before I joined them together!! Looks like we will try the process of joining the side panels to the boat this Saturday!