All decked up

After 2 weeks off due to vacation travels back to Orange County, CA to visit friends and then a long weekend in Cleveland for dancing I got back to work on the boat this week. 

I decided to tackle the deck.  First I had to install backing plates for the stern cleats.

 These actually took some doing.  You can see there are odd angles.  What you can't see is that the sides also had to be beveled.  I placed a piece over the opening, traced it out, cut it a little over-sized, and then used the rasp to get it to fit well.  Sure, I could have just hacked something to sort of fit and used epoxy to fill any gaps, but this is the stuff I enjoy.

Next I needed to get the side deck shape.  I decided to try a technique using battens with angled cross braces.  I used hot glue to glue the cross braces.  This did not work as the glue was too flexible and allowed the battens to straighten enough to pull them about 1/2" out of alignment.  Then I remembered we had an upholstery  stapler, so I grabbed that, only to find out that the staples we had on hand were slightly undersized.  Rather than run to the store I decided on a different technique.  This involved simple flopping the full 4'x8' sheet of 1/4" ply into place and tracing out the shape from below.  As this wasn't going to get me an exact shape, I cut it wide of the line.  I did the same thing for the bow and stern section.

Due to the 1/4" ply stock I had remaining, I had to use a a total of 6 piece, which required attaching them together.  I decided to scarf rather than use butt blocks because in the case of the bow section I had to or it wouldn't lay flat as the joint ran across the width of the boat.  Plus, it only takes 5-10 minutes to cut scarfs of these lengths.

I fit the bow and stern sections first.  I used screws with plywood pads to anchor them in place.  Once I had them dry-fit I set the side deck pieces on top and marked out the scarfs that would be needed to connect  the side decks to both the bow and stern decks.

I put a double coat of epoxy on the bottom and while the second coat was still tacky I epoxied it in place.  It took a fair number of screws to pull everything into place, especially in the bow.  You can't really see it in the picture below, but in the bow there are screws about every 4 inches as well as additional clamps as right near the bow even that distance allowed the deck to pull up slightly in between the the plywood backing pads.  The width of only a few inches as the bow came to a point just didn't allow for much leverage in getting it to conform to the curve of the deck.

Notice that the weight again makes an appearance.  I noticed a small bit of pull-up and rather than add another screw I just dropped the weight on it.  Going back and filling all those holes in and sanding them fair is going to take some time.

 This was the last major bit of construction.  The boat is put together and now it's just a matter of adding little bits for functionality.  I still have work to do on the bits required for sailing, like a tiller, but the hull is basically done.