Flip

 It's Thanksgiving weekend and I have sons at home to help flip the boat.  I was thinking about priming the deck before the flip, but didn't get that far before this weekend.  However I did finish glassing everything on the topside of the boat and I gave it a once-over with the Sureform and sander. 

 I have to again thank the previous builders who have provided tips on not only building the boat, but also advice on how to make the project easier.  The single best piece of labor saving advice was to put castors on the boat building cradle.  It was very easy to roll the boat out of the garage, up the driveway and to put it right next to the front yard.  From there we picked it up and placed it on plastic sheeting on the grass

Once the boat was on the grass, we rolled the cradle back into the garage for modifications.  The picture on the right shows the cross braces that we aded to support the boat in the upside-down position.  These cross members line up with frames 53.5 and 169.  I shaped the support for frame 53.5 so that it fit the contour of the deck and the front of the cabin.

The next step was to roll the boat up on its left gunwale.  One of my sons had the good idea to tilt the cradle over on its side as well so that it lined up with where we wanted it to meet the deck of the boat.  This was a great idea because we just rolled the whole thing (both the boat and the cradle) back onto the castors.  Very little lifting required and no injuries.

 A little bit of adjusting on the cradle came next so that the supports lined up with the frames and we were done with the flip.


On this Thanksgiving, I give thanks for having very strong and smart boys.  The three of us did all of the lifting, and with a bit of help from my wife and a neighbor that was passing by were able to flip the boat.




The photo to the left shows my two helpers.  






We moved the boat back into the garage.  I couldn't be happier with the condition of the hull.  I really think that using angled scarf joints between the panels (using a West System scarfer) gave the boat a naturally fair surface.  I highly recommend this approach to prospective boat builders.  

The next day

Here are a couple of pictures of the deck with the release cloth removed.  There are a few bubbles that need to be removed and a few places where the release cloth didn't make contact with the epoxy that need to be filled, but over all the surface looks really good.  A bit of prep work and the deck will be ready for priming.

Under Glass

 I glassed the deck of the boat tonight.  The pictures to the left and below show the boat with the epoxy/glass coating.  I've used release cloth on top of the epoxy for a smooth surface.  We'll see tomorrow morning how it all turned out.

Ready to Glass the Deck

 After a whole lot of fairing, smoothing, and sanding, I'm ready to glass the entire deck on the boat.  The cabin top had previously been glassed inside and out so I don't really have to put another layer on there.  However, I do need to overlap the glass from the deck onto the cabin top to strengthen the joint between them.  This joint is already glassed on the inside of the cabin, but this additional overlap should make it just that much stronger.  I measured and laid out glass for the bow first then worked backwards from there.  I started with 50" wide fabric and worked backward toward the stern of the boat.


 As mentioned below, I had already glassed in the foot bensons so as you can see in the picture on the right, I cut the deck cloth around the bensons so that I have nice smooth cloth with no wrinkles.  


Finally, I cut out similar sections of nylon release cloth which will be laid over the glass/epoxy mix.  The release cloth gives a very smooth finished surface on the epoxy coating.

Close to glassing the deck

I've been working toward glassing the deck and cockpit on the boat.  However, I was worried about how the glass cloth would form around the foot bensons on the boat.  Just in time, there was a topic on the forum at http://www.i550class.com on "how big" or how much of the deck to glass at once.  Jon from Critical Twist suggested that the bensons be glassed first and to then cut holes in the large cloth pieces covering the aft deck and cockpit which go around the previously covered bensons.  I carried through on that advice and went ahead and glassed the bensons.  The photo here shows the result.  The smaller strips of glass fabric molded very nicely around the corners of the bensons, and I didn't have to worry about distorting the rest of a large piece of glass cloth.  


In the bottom right of the picture above you can see a section of the cockpit side curves that I coated with epoxy just for a test.  

It's getting colder here

As I mentioned in the past, I chose West System 207 hardener for my project.  I like this material because it has a low amine content (less smell, less blush), it is clear, it has some built-in UV protection, and it has a slower cure time.  Unfortunately, it also requires a higher ambient temperature in order to cure than some other hardeners.  With colder weather here, this has limited my work to sanding, filling, etc. or mixing epoxy on those few days where the temperature reaches up into the 70's.  

 So on the colder days, I've been working on small projects that don't involve epoxy.  Previously, I mentioned that I decided to leave natural the cedar stripped curved panels that join the deck with the cockpit side panels.  This decision meant that I had to remove all of the staples that I put in there to hold the strips together.  This was a pretty tough job because I had previously epoxied over these strips.  

Well with a bunch of sanding, and prying, and digging, I finally got them all out.  There are of course some divots that need to be filled in, but that shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Two other small jobs that I got around to were to line the inside of the keel box with carbon fiber, and to install and trim the keel crane well (described earlier).  I did this on a nice Fall day where the temperature reached up into the high 70's


There won't be too many more warm days this year, so rather than put off work for the Fall, I went ahead and bought a heater for the garage (I mean workshop).  The unit that I bought was just a simple radiant unit I found at Home Depot.  It would cost too much to run this unit in the Winter, but it should add a few degrees to the garage (err. . . workshop) temperature, so that I can extend the epoxy season.  I'd like to glass all of the deck/cabin top in the next couple of weeks.  My plan is to flip this thing over during Thanksgiving weekend when I'll have a bunch of people around to help.

More small jobs

 I've been working toward glueing down the last remaining portions of the deck.  The only parts that weren't permanently attached were  the deck panels above cockpit sides.

   I've been thinking for some time about adding positive floatation to the boat.  I really don't like the idea of only relying on sealed bulk-heads or air bags.  A collision can easily breach a sealed area of the boat or even multiple areas.  So I decided to try adding expanded polyurethane foam as floatation material.  Since the very aft section of the boat behind frame 169 is not accessible, the time to do this was now.  In order to create a temporary mold for the foam, I duck taped plastic to the underside of the cockpit floor and constructed sides to hold up the foam so that there would be a space between the outer hull and the foam.  I poured in the non expanded mixture and watched the foam grow.  Unfortunately the foam leaked into areas where I did not intend it to be.  What a mess!  I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up this wayward foam, resulting in bloody knuckles and scraped arms.  The picture above shows the foam after I cleaned it up.  To the left is the stern.  The foam is stuck to the underside of the cockpit side panel.  I cut a way the foam in the last nine inches of this panel since I eventually need to cut an access hole here in order to get to the spin sheet turning blocks.  

 The foam does provide significant stiffness to the cedar strip portion of the cockpit (shown in an earlier post).  Since I decided not to continue using the expanded foam anywhere else in the boat.  I added some stiffeners to the sides of the forward cockpit shown to the left.  For the rest of the boat, I'm just going to add pink insulation foam underneath the deck panels.  I'll augment this fixed floatation with some air bags as well.  

 Deck is completely sealed -  After the battle of the foam, and adding the stiffeners, I went ahead and glued down the aft deck panels.  I then cleaned up excess glue and took a router to the gunwale joints using a 3/8th in. radius router bit. 

  I hadn't used a router for something this big in quite a while so I forgot a few basics, like; make sure that the screw holding the bearing on the router bit is tight.  The picture to the right shows some filler that I had to add because of this oversight.  Once the filler dries, I'll clean it up and re-route that section of the gunwale.


The last little bit of work that I accomplished was to fabricate a piece of mahogany for the very front of the cabin.  The picture below shows the result.