Some good news and some bad news. First the bad news - as I feared, pulling the bolt out of the centerboard bushings while they were still wet resulted in some misalignment. So now they don’t line up and I can’t get a bolt through them anymore - d’oh! Had to go back to McMaster Carr to order some more bushings and a drill bit big enough to drill one of them out and try again. PITA.
Besides that, I glued in bulkheads two and three and built the mast box in place.
I also had to dive into my kit scrap pile to find some parts that were actually parts but didn’t look like it - hence why they were in my scrap pile. These included:
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the foot of the mast box. It’s just a small rectangular piece of wood, nothing distinguishing about it. This one is at least listed in the plans (sheet 7 I think), but it’s not listed in the build manual on any of the kit inventory pages, which is probably why it made it into my scrap pile to begin with.
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the “scamp ramp”, aka the bottom part of the mast box ramp that sits up above the cabintop and to the aft of bulkhead 3. This was a real pain in the ass to find - it’s not listed anywhere in the plans or in the build manual. I kind of had to guess what it looked like. I wish at least the plans would be updated to include this piece!
After finding those pieces, I removed the lip on each side on the forward piece of the mast box so that the top of the side pieces would sit flush with the top of the forward piece of the mast trunk (this lines up with the plans - I still have no idea why the lip was left there in the kit piece), and then set the mast floor underneath the sides and what do you know, everything lined up beautifully.
The scamp ramp, glued in
After this point, with a successful build of the mast box in place (I didn’t want to do it on the bench in order to avoid another issue like I had with the centerboard assembly where I mistakenly glued it together slightly out of alignment - if you build things in place, this shouldn’t happen!), I:
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coated the inside of the mast box with three additional coats of epoxy to make sure it was water tight (a little awkward, but not too hard to do with a foam roller)
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did the epoxy fillets for each of the four interior corners in place (more awkward, but still not the end of the world. Can’t say my fillets are the nicest I’ve made in my life but they’ll work well)
Indeed I’ve spent a lot of time adding fillets to a lot of different surfaces recently…
Next up was gluing the cleats onto the stem for bulkhead 1 and fitting the deck support beams to rest on the top of those cleats while also being in line with the top of the stem and tapered to butt flat up against bulkhead 1.
Everything lined up and waiting for dry glue
A quick note on screws - the build manual calls for them, and before I started this build I dutifully went out and bought a whole bunch of stainless steel screws like it told me to, but I find I don’t really use them all that often.
I get the point of why the build manual encourages their use - it allows you to have confidence that parts will be held together correctly and strongly while the epoxy glue dries, which means you can keep working on multiple steps in a row before having to pause to wait for glue to dry.
That said, I don’t often find myself with 8 to 10 hour blocks where I want to be working on the boat that entire time, and so if I can clamp the pieces together well and avoid the use of screws, that’s what I’m doing. I’m kind of used to building this way anyway from previous projects. So fewer screws, although I can’t string as many steps together at once as some builders might, and that’s totally ok with me.
You don’t need so many screws!
Next up: glue on bulkhead 1, wrap the mast box in fibreglass, and even more filleting.