Getting the roof on

Almost ready for the roof of the cabin, but before I got there I needed to finish up the cabin sides.

Glassing the cabin sides

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The plans called for taping the side to deck joint, but I decided that, because the cabin sides are made out of relatively thin plywood, and I happened to have some 4oz fibreglass on hand, I might as well just glass the entire cabin side and deck joint in one go.

I started by cutting out the fibreglass and just clamping it on at the top, ensuring there was enough to drape over the side of the boat (that will get trimmed later) and wrap up slightly on to the underside of the cleat at the top of the cabin side.

I also decided that, forward of where the cabin side meets bulkhead 2, I’d just glass the cabin side itself and not wrap the glass all the way down onto the deck.

Each of the cabin sides would have two fill coats (so three coats total) of epoxy applied to fill the weave.

Getting ready for the roof

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Next step was to bevel the cabin side cleats in anticipation of the putting the roof on.

Generally the little block plane worked best for this.

For the roof itself, it turns out I needed to cut myself out a new part.

I didn’t take pictures of this, but the roof piece that came in the kit actually had a pretty serious delamination in it. I’ve never actually seen marine plywood delaminate quite like that piece did. I initially tried to epoxy the piece back together, and while it sort of worked, it was pretty obvious that the one side of the roof where the epoxy now was really wasn’t going to bend to the same degree that the other side was.

So, in order to have an even curve to the roofline, I went and bought a new piece of 6mm marine plywood and cut out a new roof piece, using the old one as a template.

(I particularly like that last picture because you can see how the edges of the roof line are not in fact straight - accounting for the compound curve of the cabin side mentioned earlier)

Gluing the roof on

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I was originally thinking I might finish the roof in varnish as one of the few bright finished pieces planned on this boat (despite the warnings of several other people that this might not look good), so I was trying to figure out how to use only clamps and straps to get a good amount of contact for the roof during dry fits.

I couldn’t do it.

Straps alone often didn’t work well, and even with the big 4x4 blocks helping to distribute the pressure they couldn’t be placed far enough outboard over the edge of each cabin side to really get great contact there.

So screw clamps (and the resulting screw holes I’d have to fill with epoxy) it would be.

From the second photo above you can see that the forward strap never even touched the cabin top in the middle, but I found if I used just 2x4s instead of 4x4s I didn’t get as good clamping pressure, so I stuck with the 4x4s and used screw clamps along the support beams on either side of the mast box in the centre of the roof.

A quick note on the strap setup:

• I routed the straps through holes I drilled into the build cradle itself.
• Because the cabin roof slopes forward slightly the straps didn’t want to hold when applied perfectly vertical to the ground. In the photo above you can see that while I drilled a forward hole in the build cradle for the forward most strap, I wound up running the strap to a hole further back to keep the strap from sliding off

After everything had setup, I took off all the clamps and straps and took a look at how I did.

Overall pretty good. Turns out the one thing I had missed was that, for some reason, I had put three clamps along the port side of the mastbox to ensure the roof was held down there, but I only put two along the starboard side. And you can see that the roof flexed up slightly on that side. It’s noticeable if you know to look for it, but with a slight modification I’m going to make to the plans hopefully it becomes even less so.

Adding the doublers

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First the doublers forward of bulkhead 2. I needed to cleanup the squeezed out glue forward of bulkhead 2 that I didn’t do before (which was a pain), and I cut the doubler out of some clear vertical grain fir I had:

Once the glue had dried, I cut off the overhang and cleaned up the edges.

On to the doublers aft of bulkhead 4…

OK this post is getting too long, so I’ll cut it off here and start a new (shorter) one for the rest of the work done this past month.