With all the tack welds in place it’s time to remove all the stitches and lay down large continuous fillets at all the seams. Prep Removing the stitches is fun. Seeing everything held together and standing on its on is satisfying. Just 1,517 more steps to go. Though I had cleaned my tack weld fillets […]
All the pieces are stitched in and are all level, flush, plumb, etc., etc. Or…as much as they’re going to get at least. Now to start tack welds. Before starting to glue, I got on the floor and taped up all cracks and holes from which epoxy might escape. Easier said than done to say […]
Before applying the initial ‘tack weld’ fillets, all the floors and bulkheads need to be squared up and leveled. As my shop floor isn’t perfectly level I first had to mess around with leveling the cradle itself. Then I stitched in the remaining floors and bulkheads (except for floor 3, more on that later). All […]
With the bottom hull panels now fully stitched to the keelson and to each other at the bow, the floors and bulkheads can go in. First, floor 4 & bulkhead 7 are fit and glued to the centerboard trunk. Those pieces fit to the trunk in just one way, and they will serve as good […]
Bringing the two bottom hull panels together at the bow was a bit of a chore. A note about the image at the top of this post : All those bulkheads are not glued in at this point. I just had them sitting there for dry fitting. Pulling the Bow Tight In short, I did […]
Before fully stitching, I quickly threw together the hull bottoms, floors, and bulkheads with just a few wires. No other reason than just to see what it looks like. It’s been a year of nothing close to resembling a boat. Following Brent and several others, I’ll be holding off on the hull sides until the […]
After just over a year of building, the keel will finally get laid. My spars are completely finished and many smaller steps are complete much earlier than in the manual sequence. So I’m hoping all of that will pay off in less crawling around in cramped spaces, etc. My oldest daughter helped me place the […]
I had expected to be at this point back in February but issues with varnish have delayed me. As it turns out, the varnish issues led to my being able to go back and apply a stain to all the spars, which I am very glad to have done. Each spar was treated as follows: […]
As mentioned in a previous post, my first coat of varnish on this build failed to ever cure. As it happens this was fortuitous since I wasn’t really fond of the natural color of the spars. Since I needed to eliminate the epoxy substrate as the cause of the tacky varnish, I was going to […]
This post is being written on May 11, 2023. Since early January my build has been all over the place. My keel was ready to go and my spars were all cut and sanded, ready for epoxy and varnish. My spars were taking up the room I needed to build the hull, so I was […]