Planking

Next step was to put the hull planks on. I thought a long time about whether I really wanted to do this, since it was going to be a lot harder to reach the interior of the boat for sanding and gluing when it was time to put the sole down, but eventually I decided that I’d rather do all the interior sanding in one go, which included sanding the inside of the seat compartments (made up on one side by the hull panels themselves). We’ll see if this turned out to be a good idea or not…

First up I loose fit the seat tops on, thinking that the cutouts for the bulkheads would help just a smidge in making sure the bulkheads are where they’re supposed to be. They can still be pushed around a little bit, but after the garboard panel gets on and filletted in, they’ll be solid in their position.

I wound up deciding to wire the hull panels up, as I couldn’t really get the curves with the panels to sit correctly via clamps only. So I wired them from the stern forward, and then started filleting the joint between the panel and the hull (for the garboard) or the panel and the previous panel (for the next two hull panels).

I was worried in particular about potentially pulling the bow stem out of alignment from left to right, so I made sure to wire up both port and starboard garboards, with the front bulkhead alignment jigs that come with the kit on, before I started filletting.

Next step was to add a pretty solid fillet across each edge, and then I put 4" 6oz fibreglass tape across the edge fillets as well (I didn’t tape the fillets from hull panels to bulkheads, as the build manual specifically mentions this isn’t required).

Once the epoxy setup (including fillets between the garboard planks and each bulkhead) it’s time for the next set of hull planks.

A little more time waiting for epoxy to setup, and then on to the final hull plank.

And now begins some sanding to get all the interior parts of the boat smooth (ish) before final epoxy coats and bilgekote paint.