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 […]
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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