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.