Glassing the roof

I don’t really have pictures of gluing in the cabin side doublers for aft of bulkhead four, but I do have a couple of pictures afterwards.

I was never really sure with these doublers how the overlap would work in the corners, but here I had the roof doubler extend a little longer. There was still a space in there that needed to be filled with epoxy but in general the side doubler didn’t reach the cabin roof.

The other thing I couldn’t quite figure out (which I eventually did figure out, but too late - yay!) was why there was an extra scribed line on the cabin side doublers. The doublers were longer then the cabin sides themselves, by about a centimeter or so, and I figured that was by design so that they could be solidly attached to the carlin as well providing extra reinforcement for that cabin side joint, but the extra scribe mark on the doubler was about two inches from the fat end - why?

Well, I didn’t figure it out until later (foreshadowing!) so I just glued the doublers on and cleaned them up. The aft edge looks good now.

Building a mastbox lip

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Apparently one of the modifications for home built scamps that has been discussed is building a raised lip around the top edge of the mast box. This allows the attaching of a “boot” to the mast to prevent rain water from falling down the mast box and collecting in the cockpit. While I haven’t seen reference to this anywhere in the forums, I saw enough references to it in various build blogs (and I liked the idea enough myself) that I thought I’d go for it.

This is what it will look like. Cutting the angles and curves to get everything to lay flush against everything else was a little tricky but overall it looks good. The acute angle on the forward lip of the mast box should nicely capture a strap or bungee cord around the base of a mast boot.

I glued the sides and put a weight balanced across both to hold them while the epoxy set. Once the epoxy set I clamped and glued in the front edge.

Once this setup, the fillets both around the outside edge of the mastbox as well as on the inside up the new ramp needed to be added.

And now the mast box lid was complete

Prepping the roof

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Next stop was to finalize prep the roof for glass. This meant filling all the screw holes, sanding the roof flat, and sanding the four edges to soften them so that glass could easily wrap around all the corners.

Ready for the glass now

Glassing time

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I used 6 oz glass for the roof, and started by cutting out a piece that would cover the entire roof (plus doublers/cleats on every side) and then cutting out the hole for the mast box. My plan was to have the glass ride up each side of the mast box lip itself.

The glass won’t cover around the corners of the mastbox lip, but I’m not too worried about that as at least for the mastbox proper I already did that.

Wetting out the glass is always fun, and went pretty easily with a squeegie.

I trimmed the excess glass off after the epoxy had cured.

In hindsight I probably should have left a little drip edge on the section aft of bulkhead 4 for the followup two coats of epoxy to fill the weave, but I trimmed the glass right to the wood edge, which just meant I have a couple of epoxy drips I’ll need to sand out.

To combat the drips I knew that were coming though, I did wrap the base of the cabin in plastic in a lot of places, although as it turns out I didn’t have very many drips to contend with through the two remaining coats.

As it turns out, the filled screw holes are quite noticeable under the glass, so I’m thinking I might now paint the cabin top. Still haven’t really decided how to finish the topsides of the boat yet.