The manual illustrates placing a piece of wood on top of the aft section of the keel and then tracing the shape from the underside. I guess you would then make a bunch of 1/4″ marks to the inside of those lines and join those marks up to make your cut lines. All this to […]
Poured lead for the keel this weekend and all went well. I’ll relate a few things that I learned or that I haven’t heard mentioned before. First, I had a couple of buddies come help and that made a big difference. When I poured the centerboard a few months ago there were just two of […]
After the complete glueup, I stood it up on the bench and stared at it for 10 minutes. Then I flipped it over and sanded the very bottom. The outer edges got a 1/2″ roundover per the manual and I gave the inside trunk edges a 1/8″ pass, just enough to take the edge off. […]
As many other builders have done, I took this in several stages and did a lot of dry fitting in between. A previous post discussed a couple of areas I wanted to be particularly cognizant of. I’m happy to say that all went well and the keel is as it should be. Blocking & Trial […]
With the rudder, centerboard, and centerboard trunk built and my spars well on the way to being finished and ready to put away, I finally get to start working on the keel. Also complete are initial coats of epoxy on a lot of large pieces like bulkheads and then multiple smaller pieces like floors. All […]
This weekend I rigged up all my spars in a ’rotisserie’ style setup so that I can apply a single coat to all sides of a spar at once. This should really speed up the finishing of these pieces. With these long angle irons that I’ve been using, it was easy to clamp up some […]
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Last weekend I finally got back to working on the boat. All my spars are now sanded down to 220 and almost ready for epoxy and varnish. I still need to trim the ends of the mast and bowsprit. At that point I will try to set up a rotisserie rig for application of epoxy […]
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After carpel tunnel release surgery I am supposed to take a 6 week break from vibrating tools and any other activities that might overly stress my hand. For quite a while now I have wanted to organize my ‘small parts organizers’. “Please allow myself to introduce…myself.” – A. Powers I have about 4 more weeks […]
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Glued up the mast on Saturday. I had two helpers and it took us about three hours, though we were not in a rush at all. Here are some pictures of everything clamped up. Below, I’ll talk about the process. Before glue, we clamped everything up dry and studied it for a while. I was […]
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I have cut the tapers in all four mast staves. Now to cut the rabbets in the two side pieces. The manual suggests for each rabbet making two cuts with a table saw. My side pieces have a noticeable bow in the last several feet, so I worried about being able to keep a long, […]
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