In prepping for the Great Glue Down, I first had to put three coats of epoxy on what would become the bottom of the deck, and I had to time this so that I had four days in a row to work on the boat - one coat per day, with the fourth day being the glue-it-on-the-boat day. This required a little scheduling to ensure I had Molly around to help.
The epoxy marathon #
Gluing the deck down is no joke. It’s a lot of epoxy mixed and spread. Even though I’ve been using fast pretty consistently, for this glue up I decided to use slow, which was a good call.
I pre fit the deck, and drilled holes for screws. I don’t really like using screws for clamps, but I didn’t think I had enough clamps for this glue up and there are some places (such as over the center ahead of bulkhead 2) where clamps can’t get, so I had resigned myself to using them. I aimed for screws roughly about every 6 inches, sometimes a bit closer, sometimes a bit further away.
We did the glue down in three stages. First stage was mixing all the epoxy for the bow portion back to roughly around bulkhead 3. We mixed all the glue, spread it on the carlins/gunwhales/etc, then put the deck down and screwed/clamped, trying to get it aligned as best we could.
Next we mixed more glue and did the port side of the deck, raising it in place and propping it up so that we could again spread the glue on the gunwhale and carlin before lowering the deck back down and screwing/clamping it.
We finished with the port side. Three sessions, a whole lot of epoxy, and a whole lot of squeeze out.
Center, lined up as best I could
I will say that the deck didn’t fit as exactly as I might expect. While I did find the center of the forward face of bulkhead 2 and the center of the deck, I found that they didn’t line up when I put the deck down to ensure it fit side to side, so there was definitely some creative fitting going on. There also wound up being a bit of a larger gap between bulkhead 2 and the edge of the deck then I expected (anywhere from 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch), but that was taken care of with a nice fillet (done by Molly!) and the overall fit worked out - I just wound up trimming more excess off one side of the boat then the other.
Here you can see the spacing of my screws near the transom, with a few clamps helping out
Removing the screws #
I didn’t do this when putting the uphaul tube in and regretted it, so I decided I’d do it this time - I removed all the screws holding the deck down once the epoxy dried and filled them in with thickened epoxy from a syringe.
To remove the screws, sometimes you needed to heat them up to break the epoxy bond and holding a soldering iron to the screw head for a few seconds did the job nicely. Most of the screws broke away with just a bit of a nudge though, no heat required.
Holes filled
It turns out filling the holes wasn’t as easy as I had hoped - it’s hard to get the air bubbles out. There is a technique to this where you have to put your syringe all the way to the bottom of the hole and then continue squeezing epoxy out as you slowly pull out the syringe. If you just pull it out, an air bubble will get trapped and revealed after you sand down the epoxy “dome” leftover.
Trimming the deck #
A short note to say I trimmed the deck using a cutoff bit in a router. It worked really pretty well except for a couple of situations:
- given the angle formed by the deck and the prow, the angle of the cutoff is a bit steep. If I had to do this again, I’d cut the front overhang off just using a japanese pull saw
- Where the router couldn’t get (like in close to some of the bulkheads) I wound up having to use a combination of pull saw/sander/rasp anyway.
A short aside #
A small rant about the drive towards cheap, shitty quality consumer products sold by Amazon. I was running low on tongue depressors, which I use as epoxy stir sticks. I had been using the same box of ’em for years, so I bought a new box from Amazon.
Look at the difference in size (and thickness) between the two. Whereas the old ones were quite sturdy and could do quite a bit of work mixing epoxy or paint stuck to sides of containers, these new ones are so flimsy.
For shame
I’m sure somebody ran the numbers to figure out they could make 5% more money by skimping on the size of the tongue depressors, and somebody in Amazon got really excited about being able to offer cheap tongue depressors on their website. Their website is so full of cheap crap. I’m increasingly thinking I’ll give up and just go to aliexpress - at least they’re honest with what they’re selling and don’t have the “brand markup” you get on Amazon (for likely the same product made in the same factory in China).
Finishing the painting #
Last bit of work while epoxy was drying on the boat was to finish up the painting of the various bits and pieces so that I could reclaim my work table.
Bottom of the centerboard cap done, getting ready to paint the topside
All done, except for the lazarette doors - they'll get done later
I still need to paint the topsides of the lazarette doors, they’ll get done a little later after some more construction work that requires the benchtop (like cleats for the cabin sides/top among other things).