Kembali

The aft cockpit deck and the forward cockpit deck are epoxied down to the tops of frames or intermediate cleat supports. You only get one shot at this, so it pays to dry-fit everything a couple of times, make some temporary alignment marks, get all your weights and clamps ready, and rehearse it. I brushed epoxy onto the undersides of the decks where they would sit on supports and then squeezed a thick bead of thickened epoxy down on those supports. Then the decks go in, alignment marks are checked, final adjustments are made, and then weights and clamps are placed.

in the bow a small deck is put over the flotation chamber to create the anchor locker. The anchor itself will be hanging from a pulpit on the bow. The rode will be stored in this locker, with two holes at the lowest points of the locker on both sides to provide drainage for any water brought up when the anchor is weighed. Also, I am terrible at cutting round holes. This one will have a round inspection plate installed. I am not quite sure CLC put this here, since there will be another way into that space. Ours is not to question why....

CLC calls for 200 Lbs of ballast for this boat, especially when lightly loaded. I worried and fretted about this a LOT. Finally, I decided to buy lead bricks from Roto Metals (https://rotometals.com). I had worried about shipping lead, but they just chuck each brick in a USPS fixed-price box and send it first-class mail. It seems a little unfair but.... Each brick comes pre-drilled, so I built wooden brackets and put stainless steel studs in them. Then those were attached to the centerboard trunk with ss screws, epoxy, and fiberglass tape. The bricks are mounted on the studs and held with ss lock washers and wing nuts (hex nuts shown in the photo were replaced with wing nuts later). I did it this way to make sure the ballast wouldn't shift if I laid the boat over, and to make it easily removable for trailering.

The two main cockpit decks are now epoxied to their supports. This is similar to the two other cockpit decks, except that these have no convenient spots to clamp them down. They are held in place with a bunch of weights ( lead bricks, steel plates, bags of sand). It's cold this time of year, and my workspace is unheated, so I draped it in plastic with a space heater inside. Then all the decks are filleted to keep water from standing anywhere and increase the strength of the join.

The deck carlins are long battens sprung into notches in the frame inboard of the shear clamps. They support the inner part of the main deck. I had a little setback doing this because I didn't open up one of the frame notches sufficiently. This created an unfair curve in the port carlin and created a stress point in the timber. It snapped right at that stress point. I re-scarfed the carlin, opened the notch a bit, and reinstalled it successfully.