It’s been about three and a half months since my last post. Since then I’ve done some thinking and work towards electrical components, installed some deck plates and installed the hull sides and transom.
None of that took a terribly long time to do. I’ve also been out of town on the weekends a fair amount. But the majority of the time can simply be chalked up to a stall as I chewed on a problem that showed up as the hull sides were stitched to the bottoms.
Problem : Gap between hull panels
The gap in the image above is about half an inch wide at its widest point. The separation begins a few inches aft of bulkhead #1 and proceeds towards the bow. At the bow, the side and bottom panels meet as they should. The separation is symmetrical port and starboard.
Short story? I’ve no clue.
Everything seems to be as it should. Bulkheads are in the right place, panels are marrying to the cradle as they supposed to, and so on. You’ll notice in the picture above that the side panels are not meeting up with the cradle arms, but that was corrected and still, no joy.
You can see I screwed in some blocks to pull the panels together and in subsequent pictures you’ll see even more of these. I eventually got the gap to be about 1/4″-3/8″ wide but that is as close as they ever got.
Below are pics from port and starboard after pulling the panels together as far as I could get them.
Below is a good interior shot showing the span and shape of the entire gap. Again, running from a few inches aft of BH1 to the bow.
You can see below that, for most of the sides’ length, the panels met up perfectly. Note several blocks towards the front of the cabin. These were necessary to keep the panels from slipping past each other in those areas.
A close-up of a couple of these blocks…
The long stall was due to my not wanting to proceed without these panels meeting as they should. I would sometimes just sit and stare at the thing, trying to think of something else to try or, as if it mattered, what I might have done wrong at some earlier stage. I even contacted CLC but they could not think of why the gap was happening either. They did however assure me that it would likely be just fine to fill in the gap and motor on.
So…in the end that’s exactly what I did. Below is the bow stitched as best it could be and ready for tack welds.
Next
Fillet and tape all the joints. Then sand for paint/varnish…