Friday, December 28, 2012

A lot of little things accomplished....

Well, the last month has resulted in a lot of little jobs getting completed.

After getting the boat flipped over, I had to level out the jig and put some v shaped forms underneath to set the boat on.  Then I could get to work on finishing the inside of the bare hull.

First up was fiberglassing all the interior seams, and there are a lot!  I had to fiberglass the chine/side seams, the transom seams, the stringers to the bottom and finally the tops and sides of the stringers.

This was done with heavy fillets followed buy 4 inch tape, 6 inch biax tape and 8 inch tape.  Around 200 feet of fiberglass tape in all.










Fiberglassing of all the interior seams took the better part of two days.  I ended up with a lot of bubbles that i had to repair.  Most of the larger ones I filled with epoxy with a syringe and a large needle.  The smaller ones I just left.

With that out of the way, I moved on to filling in all the screw holes from installing the front bow panels.  You can see all the white dots, this was from using silica thickened epoxy.




Now it was time to drill a very large hole in the boat.  It was time to install the main drain for the boat.  I made a drain tube by wrapping fiberglass around a PVC pipe covered in wax paper to get an exact 15/16" inside diameter.


I used a 1-1/8" hole saw so I would have room for some epoxy filler.

I drilled the hole most of the way through from the inside first, then when the pilot bit broke through on the outside, I started from the outside so the hole saw would not "blow out" badly.  I started the outside hole by running the holesaw in reverse and it started very smoothly.






After that, I just filled with epoxy.  Came out great.

Next I drilled the holes for the front bow eye and sealed the inside with epoxy.  It should be a solid bow  eye, it is 1/2" 316 stainless.


Tomorrow I am going to wash the inside with ammonia and then put on a couple of final coats of epoxy on the entire inside of the hull.  Today I went and picked up the MDO plywood I am using to build the inside structure.  After I get through putting on the final epoxy coats on the inside of the hull, I am going to start building the inside, starting at the front.  Hopefully there will be some good progress in the next couple weeks.