First weeks recap.
Over the course of October, I assembled the hull and fibreglassed it inside & out. Knowing some more modern stitch & glue building techniques by now, I put the manual aside and assembled the hull slightly different:
- Silica-thickened epoxy for joining the panels, but I put no fibreglass tape over the joints. No problem occurred!
- I did not "tack weld" the hull after stitching it up. Instead, I used superglue, as CLC advises in some more recent manuals. This didn't work as good as I hoped for as my glueing work wasn't careful enough in some areas - to my surprise not at the bow or stern, but in the mid section where my bevelled intersections left too much space for proper glue bonding
- After pulling the copper wires, I did the interior fillets and glassed the cockpit area, as well as the inside seams in the front and aft compartment.
- Only after that I added the sheer clamps. I did that as I didn't want to battle the reinforced hull panels. Unfortunately, one of my pre-epoxy-glued sheer clamp snapped at the joint and I had some wrestling to do to get it back in place. That's why I didn't pay sufficient attention to the alignment of the sheer clamp on the other side and it ended up sitting too low (4mm / 1/6" raise instead of 9mm / 1/3" suggested by the manual).
- After rounding over the panel intersections and the hand sanding the hull with 120 grid, I glassed the exterior. I only did the main fibreglass sheet and the bow and stern reinforcements. The second, bottom only fibreglass layer described in the manual I considered unnecessary.
- I installed the deck forms, which included some wrestling and shaping, and afterwards bevelled the sheer clamps. The sheer clamp sitting too low on one side will give me some challenges properly aligning the first two perimeter strips of the deck, as there is a bit of a gap between the deck form and the bevelled sheer clamp.
- I also laid the first strips, but on one side, the outside perimeter the scarf joint snapped. I can't glue up full length strips beforehand due to space limitations. Fixing this will take quite some hours I guess.
Temperatures are now getting too low. I might have one more good week for working in my open ventilation garage, but then it's time to store everything away for winter.
