I made slow progress on the rudder over the previous few months since the projects were mostly on the boat itself leaving the workbench (mostly) free so here are all the updates wrapped into one place, as well as my efforts to undo something I did much much earlier in the build.
Rudder updates #
Back when I was fibreglassing the cabin sides I also pulled out some 6 oz fibreglass and decided now was the time to start fibreglassing the rudder.
After doing both sides individually, I then did the leading and trailing edges, again one by one, with overlap near the bottom of the rudder blade.
Laying out the top edge
The sides and edges were all coated in epoxy three times to fill the weave and then sanded smooth.
Next up was to drill some holes - the uphaul line and downhaul holes.
I did the drill-fill-drill treatment on those, meaning I had to fill them with epoxy and then drill them a second time.
Finally, I wanted to drill-fill-drill the main pivot hole, but I also bought slightly different copper tubes for it based on my experience with the centerboard. I wound up buying ones with shoulders, which meant I needed to enlarge the pivot hole quite a bit for everything.
When gluing the copper bushings in, I again learned a few lessons from the centerboard:
- I wanted to insert (and leave inserted for the epoxy to set) the bolt that will be used for pivoting, to ensure the bushings are lined up
- I needed to figure out how to clamp the bushings inwards to make sure they didn’t “float” out while the epoxy was setting up
Clamp setup with plastic barrier to make sure the epoxy doesn't glue the clamp into the assembly
The bolt did wind up sticking a little bit after the epoxy had set, but I was able to bang it out with a mallet and the bushings both stayed solidly in place.
Finally, the last step was to add a small round over for the down haul so that the line would lay down appropriately, and glass it in with three coats of epoxy to make sure it’s sealed.
Adding back the bulkhead 4 cutouts #
I hemmed and hawed about whether to do this for a loooooooong time. I finally figured that I needed to make a decision on this before I flipped the hull, and that time was increasingly getting close. As you can see, I ultimately decided to glue the bulkhead 4 cutouts back in.
I did this mostly for one reason - because my hatch cutouts in bulkhead 3 are so large and the lower outside edge extends closer to the side of the hull then the stock recommendation, I became a little worried that during a capsize, with the cutouts gone in bulkhead 4, the side of the boat in the water would flood and water might get past bulkhead 3 into the front of the boat, making the capsize recovery much worse. With the cutouts in place, apparently you have quite a while for the boat laying on its side before water gets high enough that it can flood past the seat and bulkhead 4 into the space between b4 and b3 - it’ll stay draw for quite a while.
So although I don’t really like the look of it, I added them back in for safety.
As it happens, I had kept the cutouts I made, and they still fit very closely, so I just butt-joined them back into bulkhead 4.
Using clamps with the two wood boards ensured the cutouts were evenly aligned front and back with the edge of the surrounding bulkhead.
Notice that while the starboard cutout fits perfectly, when I was cutting out the port side I didn’t quite make the curve perfectly at the bottom of the cutout, so there’s a void there. I’ll fill that in later.