Cockpit sides installed

As it turns out, I wound up not making a lot of progress (read: any) on the boat during the month of August. I guess the summer weather was calling me instead.

But I was back at it (slowly) in September. Next step was to get the cockpit sides installed.

Dry fitting

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First step was to just try and dry fit these things (which was somewhat difficult since they are longer then the cockpit themselves - they bow outwards to follow the curve of the hull, meaning dry fitting required bending them and really forcing their way in there) and make sure they were a tight fit.

You can see in that second photo above not only the rounded front corner but also the bevel that I put in along one edge - necessary to make room for a hardened fillet of epoxy that I previously put in on the bottom of the cabin side doublers.

Here you can start to see the problem. I referenced earlier that I wasn’t sure why there was a scribe mark on the lower edge of the cabin side doublers, so I just installed them as the instructions described. Well, turns out that the sequence of steps being described in the manual didn’t really match up with the sequence of build steps that was happening in the pictures in the manual - this happens multiple times in the manual, but turns out in this case it was important. In the pictures, they installed the cockpit sides first, then they installed the cabin side doublers. In this sequence, that scribe mark indicates where you would need to bevel the doubler so that it meets the cockpit side cleanly.

But of course the text describes installing the cabin side doubler first, then installed the cockpit sides, which is what I did. Doing it this way has two effects:

• the doubler takes up roughly half the height of the cockpit carlin to which the cockpit side is glued, meaning there’s less meat for where the cockpit itself is to attach
• it also forces the cockpit side lower at the front (the part was obviously designed to be installed completely covering the carlin and snugged right up against the bottom edge of the cabin side itself) which means the entire cockpit side gets installed on a little bit of an angle.

I gotta say, I really dislike this build manual. I’ve said this before, but it’s the worst of both worlds - it makes you think it’s detailed and error free when it’s actually not. I’d prefer either one that’s correct with lots of details, or one with far fewer details where you have to figure everything out yourself and thus never develop the expectation of mistake free.

Cockpit side return to cabin

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The other effect of the above mixup is that the pieces from the kit to bring the cockpit side forward edge into the cabin really didn’t fit anymore.

Looks like my cockpit sides won’t be as tall above the deck as they were perhaps originally intended to be. Eh, the boat should still float.

So I cut and installed new ones.

The pictures above with the small patches of fibreglass ready to install perhaps make it slightly more clear that the two returns aren’t exactly even - the one on the port side makes closer to a 90 degree angle with the cockpit and cabin sides, whereas the starboard side one is a more shallow angle. At first I was kind of annoyed I did that, but now I kind of like it - one of those “of course it’s a homebuild!” moments.