December 6, 2024

PT11-29

Friday

After returning the boat halves to their normal orientation, and with the epoxy-potted hardware fittings cured, I removed the peel ply from the aft tanks’ new fiberglass tabbing, and lightly sanded the areas as required.  The epoxy was still a bit too soft to sand properly, but all I really needed to do was clean up a few of the corners to prepare for the next step, which was more fillets.

Note that if I’d been building this boat to be a clear interior finish, I’d not have used a marker to mark the fiberglass tape when I cut it.  This boat will be painted inside.

After cleaning up the boat, I applied epoxy fillets around all the outside edges of the tanks to complete their installation.  These were cosmetic as well as structural.

With leftover epoxy from the fillets, I filled the alignment slots around the transom and stern quarters of the hull.

I turned the two parts of the boat upside down on the bench and hung the bulkheads out over the edge a bit, and clamped each half at the opposite end just to hold things in place. I used a scraper, putty knife, and solvent to remove the remnants of the balsa wood spacers and adhesive.

The hull planking was mostly flush with the bulkhead panels, especially at the bottom three panels of the boat, but in other areas the hull was proud of the bulkhead.

With a firm, heavy sanding block (a piece of 2×4 in this case), I sanded these areas flush with the bulkheads.  I wrapped a piece of masking tape over the bulkhead end of the sandpaper on the block, which raised this end up just enough so that my sanding efforts didn’t affect the existing bulkhead surface much or at all.  Most of the required work was at the top edges of the bulkheads on both halves of the boat (now facing down towards the bench with the boat upside down).

Because my saw had wandered as I began my early cut through the port upper gussets and gunwale–though I corrected it immediately–there was a roughly saw kerf-width ledge in the bulkhead there, which extended over a relatively large portion of the area because of the near-vertical orientation of the saw at that time.  There were other minor saw marks hither and yon that required work as well, but this particular one, being at the edge of the hull,  would affect the next “normal” steps outlined in the manual, so I needed to fair this in now, before I could really move on.

After preparing the bulkhead halves, and masking over the hardware and gasket slots as needed, I applied epoxy fairing compound here and to the other areas as needed.  At this stage of the project, there was nothing else left for me to do till this epoxy repair work cured; the next step from here involved creating an epoxy edge at the sharp corners of the hull/bulkhead intersection all the way around both parts of the boat, but that would have to wait till I’d brought this particular section back to its proper contours.

Total time billed on this job today: 3.5 hours