Lots of little things that are getting tidied up. A lot of work on the centerboard pin and some on the centerboard itself, I’ll save those details for the next post.
This is a short one on two topics - I’ve (almost) finished all of the cleats and I glassed the footwell.
At this point I’ve glued in all of the cleats except for the fore/aft cleats between bulkheads 4 and 5 that make up the water tank. I need to finish putting together the centerboard pin retention system before I glue in the final two cleats as the starboard one would inhibit access a little bit otherwise.
The biggest change here was figuring out what to do between bulkheads 7 and 8 (the transom). The plans call for scuppers, but reading online it seems that nobody has been able to fix venturi bailers that work particularly well, and it occurred to me the scuppers make sense only if all the water from the cockpit sole drains into them - given I installed the footwell, it’s likely that if I get water in the cockpit it’s going into my footwell.
So I nixed the idea of scuppers. This meant one long cleat across the transom at the back and two fore-aft cleats between bulkheads 7 and 8.
Cleats but no scuppers
The annoying aspect of this is that I glued the transom doubler on before I installed the transom (don’t do that, kids), and further it slid down a little bit and I didn’t notice before the epoxy setup, so in order to slide the cockpit sole under the transom doubler I had to chisel out the bottom 1/8" or so. That was annoying. The cockpit sole now sits flat back to this rear cleat, but it’ll definitely need a nice strong fillet along the transom to fill the gaps back there.
Actually, another interesting note - apparently I put the rear bulkhead for my footwell forward of the line marked on the plans, whereas I should have put it aft of the line marked on the plans. The cockpit sole only extends to the aft edge of the bulkhead now, not right on top of it. I might just make a new cockpit sole from a sheet of ply I bought to size it correctly and turn the actual cockpit sole into scrap.
The other progress was that I glassed in the footwell. I cut a piece of glass to cover the bottom and all four sides of the footwell, with the corners cut out of the glass to allow for a clean seam when epoxied in. This, plus the doubler installed earlier, makes the footwell damn strong, stronger then the water tank honestly.
Below is the picture after one coat of epoxy and waiting for the epoxy to setup. This wasn’t my finest glassing result, I can tell there are lots of bubbles in the glass, but I’m not too worried about it, given that I intend to paint the boat and I don’t even think glassing the footwell was technically necessary so grinding out any bubbles and smoothing over those small issues under paint shouldn’t be a big deal at all.
I’m gradually learning the correct way to fillet and then glass - put a fillet down, smooth it out, and then allow it to harden before glassing on top of it the next day. You get the chemical bond this way, and the glass just winds up going on much more smoothly.
First coat, waiting for a trim