Wow! Two months have gone by since my last post. As you know from my prior posts it's hot in FL and I'm not doing too much work. When it's over 90 (and more in the garage) the epoxy sets up way too fast for doing anything more that small glueing tasks.
I've been concentrating on the stuff I can do. I've finished with the seat back framing and installed the transom skirt. Up front I fiberglassed the anchor well and installed the breast hook.
The seat back framing went pretty easy. Reminds me of building an model airplanes and installing the fuselage stringers. Pretty straight forward. The upper two need to be beveled so that they are even with the framing tops and each other such that the seat back tops will fit flat and be perfectly horizontal. In the manual they use a block plane to do this. I tried this for the starboard side and it worked well but on the port side I decided to experiment with a spoke shave. The spoke shaved worked MUCH better for me and I was able to do the same job in less than 1/3 of the time.
One problem is that after I did all the framing I test fitted the seat back panel and although it fit perfectly on the transom side it was around 1" short of abutting the companion way bulkhead. I don't know where I went wrong. I've got a plan to just do a splice with biaxial tape on the outboard sides (so that they can't be seen) to add some length to these pieces. I don't know where I went wrong, all my follow up measurements seem to verify that everything is in the right place. Hmmm.
The transom skirt and the block that support them were a bit of a challenge. I cut and recut the mounting blocks. They're actually pretty complex since the transom mounting face is beveled in two directions. Had a couple of false starts but I wrestled them into submission. The transom skirt itself gave me some fits. Didn't know if I should align it to the rear or front edge of the transom. I struggled with it for a couple of hours and then decided to give it a break. Glad I did I was looking at the manual and found a nice side view sketch on page 177 that answered all my questions. Installation went without problems after that.
The fiberglassing of the anchor well was a little scary for me it's hot here and I needed to move fast or make a mess of the job. In addition I have to do my final cuts after I start to anchor the fiberglass down. Usually when I can't use my normal method of taping off the area to be fiberglassed so that later I can trim to the edge of the tape I find that I make a mess of the edges of the fiberglass with strands coming off and polluting my work. I carefully laid everything out and rehearsed the way I would do it. In the end it turned out to be a non-event and the layout is one of the best fiberglassing jobs I've done to date.
Cleaned up and used a router to round over the upper breast hook and installed that with very little problem. Looks nice!
Hours this session: 20
Hours total: 369
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