I took a bit of a break on the build. I didn’t think it was that long actually, but I can tell from the timestamps here that it was almost 2 years long. Well I’ll be damned.
I did finally clean out the garage (sold the mootorcycle too!) and gave myself a crap ton more space to restart. Interestingly, I was working under the assumption that my first step on restarting would be to add coats 2 and 3 of epoxy to all the bulkheads and such. After re-reading the assembly manual again, and thinking more about the steps, I decided after the fact that this wasn’t necessary after all.
It doesn’t make sense, after all. The parts will all be glued together, I’ll have opportunities to coat them after final assembly later, and coating them all now would just result in lots more sanding. So the thing that I dreaded doing for so long? Yeah, not necessary. Sigh.
So I screwed the hull bottom to the building frame and loosely started to assemble the different bulkheads with the seat longitudinals.
As you can see, it didn’t fit together easily right off the bat. Lots of air gaps. Going to have to do a bunch of work to tighten these up, which is making me wonder how I tighten them up, only to undo that, apply glue, and then redo it before the epoxy sets up…
At this point, I decided that perhaps I really wanted to build the centerboard case on the benchtop rather then in the boat. So I started in on that. First step was to glue up the centerboard case doublers (using the pivot hole to help with alignment).
Both sides of centerboard case being glued up
Then I had to drill out the centerboard case hole (in both the case sides as well as the centerboard itself, something I never did). I got really worked up about making this as perfect as possible. My worry was warranted.
What I should have done was to stack the two sides of the centerboard case directly on top of each other, line them up, and drill them straight through ensuring perfect alignment. Instead, I constructed the centerboard case first, meaning I had the big air gap between the two sides of the case where the centerboard goes, which makes drilling a straight hole a lot harder. Hindsight is 50/50 they say…
But without hindsight yet, I figured I needed a drill press for this. This caused me to discover the Southeast Seattle Tool Library which had one I could borrow! Awesome!
So I drilled and then filled both the centerboard and the case sides.
This drill press was massive
Once set I then needed to drill again. I drilled both with a 5/8" forstner bit, and again used the drill press, making sure the work was level in both planes to make sure I was getting a hole directly through the centerboard & case sides at right angles.
I almost couldn't lift the drill press into my truck it was so heavy
As it turns out, the holes I drilled were a little too small to fit the bushings I bought, and so this is where all my careful prep went out the window.
I really needed something like a 21/32" hole, but they don’t sell those forstner bits, so I drilled with a 11/16" bit. That hole, of course, turned out to be too big, and the bushings are quite loose. So now gluing them up I’m going to have to figure out how to do it such that everything is perfectly aligned at glue up time (as opposed to relying on the holes themselves being perfectly perpendicular and aligned). So that’s a bit of a bummer, but oh well.
As I would later discover, not all 5/8" bits are the same. A forstner bit will drill a slightly different size hole from a spade bit which will drill a slightly different sized hole from a hole saw which will drill a slightly different sized hole from a regular drill bit. I might have been fine here if I had just tested beforehand and choose a different type of 5/8" bit. I didn’t know that then, although I do now…
Also in retrospect, the drill press was overkill. I could have and should have just used a hand drill with a drill press guide attachment. I’ll likely do that when it comes time to drilling the rudder blade out for it’s bushing.
Next step is to glue up the centerboard case itself on the bench.