Compartments sanded, primed, and painted

After spending more hours than were fun sanding all kinds of small little areas in the watertight compartments I got them primed and painted.  Since these areas will be covered by decks, I just needed to give the surface a good roughing.  I didn't worry about getting it smooth and fair.  It's obvious where the fiberglass tape is. Given how much time and effort it took, I'm not looking forward to fairing and smoothing the cockpit.  It's going to take a bunch of time and effort.

Upright again

It's back upright and ready to be finished off.  First up is sanding and painting the watertight areas.  I'm not planning on doing much to fair them smooth as they will be covered by a deck and only accessible through small hatches.

The hulls is painted...maybe.

After priming, sanding, and priming some more, it was time to throw on some paint.

I rolled and tipped 3 coats.   Despite thinning with water and using a paint conditioner I still ended up with brush marks.  Maybe it was the paint, maybe it was the brush, maybe it was that it was nearly impossible to keep a wet edge.  The paint dries so quick it just doesn't have much time to level.  I am really happy with the amount of sheen.  semigloss was the right way to go.

I am going to let it set for a few days and see about sanding it with some fine sandpaper and putting on an overly thinned coat.  I'm hoping to be able to get it smoother, but if I can't it's not a bad paint job to live with.

Starting to paint

As the keel runner and skeg will be the first thing to touch during beaching, inadvertent grounding, and trailering I decided to add some protection to the wood.  I opted to throw on a layer of glass.

I decided to use the 6oz woven sheet rather than the 12oz biaxial tape, as the tape was too stiff to wrap around the sides of the keel runner.

It turns out, the 6oz woven stuff didn't wrap around the corner so well either.  The edges of the tape lifted, necessitating cutting it off.  I would have been better off just using thickened epoxy.  Live and learn.  It took a couple of iterations to get it all smoothed out and ready for paint. 

I put on 3 coats primer today.  The results aren't all that great.   The primer was fairly transparent, didn't self level very well, and dried so quick that I couldn't get the thickness all that even.  It's cheap primer, so this may be a case of get what you pay for.  Since it's just the primer coat I wasn't to worried about getting it just right.  I'll sand it smooth and see if I need another coat.  I used some paint conditioner, but will need to thin the paint significantly if it behaves in a similar manner.  I'm hoping I can get the paint to dry slower and self level better.

Skeg complete

The pieces are on, let the sanding commence.  I'm hoping to be ready to start painting in a couple of weeks.

It's still upside down.

After glassing the hull, I still needed to glass the transom.  I didn't want to overlap the tape and deal with the ensuing ledge it would create, so I used the heat gun and cut a strip of glass and pulled it off.

This gave me a nice clean edge to work up to.  I laid the cloth on the transom, overlapping the cut edge, and wet it out.  Once the epoxy started to set I cut the glass back to the the line.  The end result turned out nice.

You can see the line because when I cut the glass off I scored into the wood.  However, it's smooth to the touch so once it is painted over the seam will be invisible.

I plan on varnishing the transom, so I've been trying to make sure it stays looking nice.  So far so good.

After sanding the hull smooth after glassing I spread on another light coat of epoxy, which I will sand again before painting.  I may do this many times; it depends on how much I end up caring about getting a very smooth paint job.

Next up was making the keel runner. It took a while as it is a long piece of wood that needed to be cut, shaped and glued.  This is it being glued in place.  The toughest part was cutting out the slot for the centerboard, as it was difficult to get a tool in the slot to clean it up.

Then I made the skeg...twice.  I first made it out of a 2 part lamination of 3/8"  MDO.  After making it I decided I'd rather use the better marine plywood I had, as I had several long, narrow pieces of scrap that would work, so I mad a 3 part lamination of 1/4" marine ply.  The next day I epoxied on a wood strip to cover the end grain of the plywood, as it is susceptible to water ingress.

I did add a clamp to replace the duct tape after taking the picture.  After letting it set overnight I cleaned it up and glued it to the keel runner.  It has a slight bend in it, due to the unnoticed fact that the table I laminated it on had a bit of a bow.  To help straighten it and hold everything in place while the epoxy was setting, I nipped the heads off some small nails and tapped them into the keel runner.

This allowed me to take the bow out of the skeg when I tapped it down onto the nails.  A bunch of epoxy and it's in place.

I'll need to do some cleanup work and increase the size of the fillets as well as round the edges and smooth the transition to the transom, but it's basically done, so long as it stays in place while the epoxy sets.  Along with the pins it was weighed down.  I made sure it was vertical by by using a level and a wedge with a heavy weight.  You can get an idea of it from the picture.

At this point I'm ready to start prepping for painting.  That's likely to take a while, but I'm hoping to have it painted before the end of the month.  The plan is at least 2 coats of primer (the first might be sanded off, and then 2 coats of paint.

Coating the hull

I layed the glass on the hull Thursday night.  It's surprisingly well behaved, moving enough to go around curves without wrinkling.  You use a small hand sweeping brush to get it to lay along the hull.

Today was the day to finish the job.  The weather did not help things out.  The rate of the epoxy reaction is very temperature dependent.  Manufactures make different hardeners with different set times so that based on the air temperature you can get you mix to stay workable for long enough, but not take forever to fully cure.  During the summer I used the slow hardener because of the heat.  To give myself more working time I would often cool my cup of goo in ice water while working with it, which worked well.  I debated getting the medium hardener for the hull, but when I checked the forecast and saw overnight lows in the 50s with a daytime high in the low 70s I decided to go with the slow.  The need to get multiple coats on in a day required pushing things to the too fast side.  However, the forecast was a little off.  Last night only got down to about 60 and the high today was 79.  I helped offset this by refrigerating the epoxy last night.  That kept it cool all morning which was great, as the initial wet-out was slow.

One of Collyn's writer friends came over to help out.  He is an amateur word worker, a bit envious of the boat build, and had never played around with fiberglass.  We had a fun couple hours pushing goo around with plastic spreaders.  It took about 2.5 hours to do the initial wet out.  The big time sink was working it in around the gunwale.  It took work to get the glass to stay on the fillet while wetting out the face of the gunwale.  However, we did a fairly nice job of it, though it's hard to tell in the picture.

I waited several hours between coats, letting it get tacky before using a small roller to roll on another coat.  Each of the additional coats took less than an hour, and then I did a final coat with a sponge brush as it looked like the weave wasn't fully filled. I then gave it a drag with a dry foam brush to smooth things out. I'd worked out an estimate for the epoxy needed from a calculation from the Gougeon Bros epoxy book, and came in a little under that so I'm hoping I hit the sweet spot between not enough to fill the weave, and too much that will require turning expensive epoxy into expensive dust. There are some imperfect spots, as by the time the final coat went on this evening the garage (and the epoxy) was above 70, so some of it was already gelling on the hull before I got it fully smoother.

I did have one major failing.  I wanted to get the transom glassed as well, but for some reason never recognized that I still needed to round the corners where it joins the hull so the glass would go around the corner.  It wasn't until I wet out the transom glass that I realized my omission.  It left small air pockets along the edges.  I decided to let it set some and see if I could press the glass down into the setting epoxy, forcing it to take the bend.  It worked, but only for a few minutes, so I ended up pulling it all off. It will require a little extra sanding work, but there's nothing that can't be fixed as if I'd done it right to begin with. Once the hull job fully sets I'll round the edges and then glass the transom at the same time I glass the rudder and centerboard, which means I need to shape the rudder this week.

As you can see in the photos I put down some newspaper to try and keep drips off the floor.  I used newspaper instead of plastic because I wanted something it could soak into some as I knew I would end up walking in it some as well.  I wasn't sure how much it would end up soaking through and sticking to the garage floor.  It wasn't too bad, but again, given the quicker setting time, I've got some floor cleanup to do with a heat gun.

Rounding the chines

I'm not a huge fan of sharp lines on a boat.  Unfortunately, a stitch and glue boat end of with panels meeting in sharp lines.  A lot of people leave them like this.  I decided to take the time to round them over.

This is what it looked like.  By looking toward the stern on the right you can see the sharp line where the chines meet.

and this is what it looks like after rounding the chines over.

Upside down

IT was time to flip the boat and work on the bottom.  Last weekend I put together a support system out of some oriented strand board.  Then I had some friends help me flip it, which took all of about 3 minutes as it doesn't weight much more than 100 lbs.  Now it will be a lot of hours of sanding, fiberglassing, and painting.

I'm just about done with that hole centerboard thing.

The metal working took a while.  I had to cut and shape flat bar to hook the raising/lowering rod to, then find a way to attach the rod.  Then I had to cut the pin and covers.  It all took a while.  I still need to make a handle for the end of the rod, but I'm not quite sure what I want to do, so I'm going to wait.

I decided to fill the circle in with some epoxy so it wouldn't slop and band around as much.

I cut some bar to length and then screwed it and epoxied it to the board.  After testing, I had to cut some of the ends as they were a little too long and would bang into the top of the case when dropping the board.

I over drilled the holes for the pin so I could fill it in with epoxy.  This will both seal the plywood edges as well as provide a bushing to reduce wear on the hole.

Then I cut some plates to cover the pin and seal it.  I need to get some rubber sheet or similar to use as a gasket.

 Final step was to fit it in place and cut the centerboard slot.  Tomorrow I'll epoxy it in.

This is taking forever!

I've been working on the centerboard  and case for quite a while.  There are several small little jobs that go into getting them built and installed.  I've taken some small sidetracks just to get a little something else done.

I've cut some holes in the bottom of the boat so I could dry-fit the case.  It all worked fine, so I went ahead and epoxied it together.

I still need to drill the holes for the pivot pin through the epoxy that I cast into a larger hole. Then it can be mounted into the boat.  I will still need to make the case top pieces.  I also shaped the centerboard.  I managed to dull up my rasp, so I broke down and bought an inexpensive angle grinder.  It helped the remainder of the job go much quicker, and will come in handy when I need to shape the rudder.

 

 The silver stuff inside is lead to weight it down.  I went back and forth on this but finally decided to add the lead.  This way I don't have to use a quick release cleat to avoid damage in a grounding (likely in the shallow waters I shall be plying) and it will give me some ballast down low for stability.

I wanted to avoid mounting lead because it would take a bunch of time and incur some additional cost as I am not currently set up to melt lead.  So instead I sourced some ingots that I can drop straight in and embed in epoxy.

In an effort to get something done I made and installed the mast step, mast partner and added some belaying pins. The belaying pins were actually from an old paper towel holder that was here when we moved in.  I'll need to oil them and I don't know how long they will last, but they look great and were free.

Making parts

I'm at the point of the build where rather than making pieces for the boat structure, I'm making a bunch of parts for sailing: mast partner, mast step, centerboard case, centerboard, rudder and such.  It's a bunch of marking and cutting without much to show for it.  I'm trying to save up the glues jobs so I can get a bunch done at once and minimize the waste.  When gluing flat panels, there is a lot of squeeze-out.  If I have several things to glue, I just put the squeeze-out on the next part and keep chugging along.



The plans for the mast partner specify a simply trapezoidal shape.  I didn't care for it, so I drew a more curvy version.  I cut out the 1st piece a few days ago and after marking and cutting some other pieces I cut the last 2 pieces out of remaining scrap.  It's a three piece lamination of 1/2" ply.  I'm pretty sure half the glue I used came out after clamping, hence the plan to glue several things at once and take advantage of all of my clamps.  This pic is after removing most of the squeeze-out.

This morning I cleaned up lamination and beveled the rear for mounting.  I will dry fit it tomorrow and then glue it once I have a handful of things to glue.  The mast step is next on the list.

I also didn't care for the bluntness of the bow (seen below) after cutting the gunwales to length.  It's looked a bit sphinx-like, as if it's nose was chopped off.

So I epoxied on a chunk of wood.  I wasn't sure how I was going to clamp it.  I ended up just using duck tape pulled tight.  Once the epoxy cured it only took about 20 minutes to go from this:

to this.

Not it looks like it's ready to go forth upon the water.

Cutting out the centerboard and floor stiffeners

The last couple days have seen little physical work done, as I have spent a ton of time figuring out the rigging.  I had to place an order for some more fiberglass cloth as I neglected to take into account that I needed to glass the interior of the centerboard case, so I decided to save on shipping on try and get everything else ordered as well.  Undoubtedly I have forgotten something and will need to place another order later.

The rigging plan for the boat is pretty sparse.  It calls for a mainsheet traveler running across the rear.  The location of this was determined by the sheeting angle on the sprit rig option, so it can be used boomless if one want.  The shorter lower spar on the lug as compared to the boom means that the rear traveler gets pulled forward into the area of the rear thwart, getting in the way of anyone trying to sit there.  I decided to move the traveler forward to the center thwart as I am not worried about sheeting angles because I will be using the lug rig.  If at some point in the future I want to change things around, it will be simple.

So here is what I have done:

Cut out the centerboard trunk sides and case logs.

Cut out and installed the floor stiffeners.

Note the cutouts in the end for drainage.

Epoxied into place and curing.

 I also ran a little experiment based on some stuff I had read.  By covering fiberglass with plastic sheet after it has been wet-out with epoxy, it holds the surface flat.  This eliminates the need additional coats to fill the weave and the subsequent sanding needed to get a flat surface.  As you can see, it came out pretty flat.