Making the centerboard case

I decided to make the centerboard case on the benchtop instead of making it on the boat directly like the instructions talk about. I gotta say, in retrospect, this wasn’t the right decision, at least not for me.

So the first step was to assemble bulkheads 4 through 7 with the seat longitudinals and setup the posts at the front and rear of the centerboard case. Once there, I could drill pilot holes through the seat longitudinal as well as through the outward side of the centerboard case to best locate where the posts will go when glued in (no pictures for this step).

Next step was to take the seat longitudinal off the boat and sand away the epoxy coating where the posts would be glued on, in order to give the epoxy something to hold on to.

I wound up doing this for the portion of the seat logitudinal further down where bulkhead 7 attaches to it as well since that will eventually be glued/filleted in as well and the epoxy will need a surface to attach to there as well.

Finally the next step was to glue in the posts, using the screw holes to make sure they were glued into the right spot. The first time I did this, it didn’t go according to plan!

I loaded up the back post with epoxy and put it on the seat longitudinal and then added the screws carefully to make sure it was where it needed to be, only to discover that I had somehow managed to attach it in such a way that the centerboard post was overlapping pretty significantly into the slot that’s used by bulkhead 5. Significantly enough that bulkhead 5 would have never fit into the slot anymore.

WTF? How did that happen?

So I wiped off all the epoxy, let the rest set, sanded it off the next day, and tried again.

This time, I was very careful as I put in the screws that I was pulling the centerboard post into the seat longitudinal in the exact place I was expecting it to land. Turns out that when you use pilot holes, they’re not great for perfect lining up - they’re designed to have the screw bite into the backing piece of lumber but not the front piece, rather it just pulls the front piece into the backing piece as it’s tightened. This means there can be enough room through the hole in the front piece that the alignment isn’t perfect. Lesson learned!

This worked better the second time around, although still not perfect…