Finishing the Skegs and fiberglass work

I had a second ablation in early May and that caused my health to deteriorate quite a bit - very little work got done on the boat unfortunately. It didn’t help that I was at a stage where whatever needed to be done generally involved hand sanding - something that I couldn’t easily do given my health issues, so the boat stayed mostly quiet in the garage for the past few months. Having to spend a month in Toronto helping my parents also didn’t help with the timing.

That said, when I did manage to spend some time in there, I was working on the skegs and on all of the various jobs that have to happen while the boat is upside down. They’re not quite done yet, but getting closer.

Front bow protection

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I decided that the front edge where the garboard planks join together needs as much protection as it can get because it’s going to get a lot of wear. So I decided to cut another strip of fibreglass and apply it to this joint specifically.

That’ll make three layers of fibreglass on this joint - two 6 oz layers from the overlapped garboard pieces and this one, which I think was also 6 oz but I can’t really remember (may have been just 4 oz).

Skeg prep work

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Cutting the skegs out was a bit awkward (these things are a good 6’ long if not longer), but amazingly my little bandsaw managed to cut both of them out.

After that came the first fit, just to see how poorly I had done cutting out a fair curve that matched the curve of the hull…

The centerboard slot is supposed to be outboard of the skeg, so I positioned the starboard skeg to be as close to the centerboard slot as I dared and the port skeg to be equidistant from the midline of the boat. They’re not quite as far apart as some other builders’, but they look good to me.

You can see that I also modified the shape of the skegs somewhat from the plans. The original skegs in the plans have a pretty steep rise at the very beginning, and I had heard reports of that causing issues sometimes when getting the boat onto a trailer or similar circumstances - easing the transition with a more gradual rise from the bottom of the boat onto the skeg seemed like a good idea to me. I tried to keep the overall amount of lateral surface area the same though, so my skegs wound up being a bit longer and extending a bit further forward then the plans to fit that forward tapered end.

The next step was to basically clean up the skegs, sanding them smooth, and working on the mating surface with the boat to ensure they matched up well with few gaps. A sander borrowed from the tool library worked best for this.

I also managed to almost forget about the handhold that should be routed into the skegs. This I did with a router bit - I clamped the skeg to the tabletop, and then used the edge of the build cradle again to provide a guide that matched the curve of the bottom edge of the skeg itself for the router to run along and add a groove to both sides of the skeg.

This worked surprisingly well. After doing this, I rounded over all the outside edges with the router as well as hand sanding the edges of the grooves themselves to round themover a bit as well.

At this point, the skegs are ready to be glued on.

Gluing the skegs on

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I didn’t want to screw through the hull bottom to attach the skegs, so for this I wanted to glue them on. I decided I’d coat both parts with epoxy, then butter them up with thickened epoxy, and then put as much weight on them as I could, spread across both skegs at the same time. I tried to use everything I could find that was reasonably heavy and portable in my garage for this to work.

After the epoxy cured I pulled off all the weights and then added a nice thick fillet all the way around both skegs.

Glassing the skegs

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I was hemming and hawing about putting some kind of a rub strip on the skegs themselves - a lot of people apparently use a high density plastic called UHMW, but I figure the oceans don’t need even more plastic in them, especially plastic that will obviously rub off on every beach landing, so that was out. I looked at stainless steel strips, but those were pretty expensive for 1/4" 6 foot long pieces, and not easily attainable in Seattle (or at least not that I could find anyway).

So I finally decided that I’d just glass the skegs. I probably didn’t even need to do this given they’re made out of white oak, but I figured a couple layers of glass wouldn’t hurt things and would be pretty repairable down the line if they needed to be. Is using a bunch of epoxy (ie, plastic) better then just putting UHMW strips on? Hard to know.

I did the port skeg first and I definitely had trouble getting the glass to lay flat in one section. I didn’t worry too much about this because I figure that area won’t often be hitting rocks on the ground during beachings and I had always planned to add a second layer of glass anyway.

When I went to glass in the starboard skeg I did a much better job of getting the glass to lay flat.

For the second layer, I just used 6oz glass tape, so whereas the first layer covered the entire skeg (including the routed out hand hold grooves) this second layer only covered the “running surface” of the skegs all the way back to the transom.

A lot of hand sanding to get everything flat and fair and ready for primer (or, if needed, fairing putty) was next. Sanding the grooves on the skegs in particular can only be done by hand, so it had to wait until I was feeling much healthier.

So it’s the drive to paint now, since the paint has to be applied during summer when the temperatures are right. To that end, next up is:

• Building the rudder cheek assembly, since the pintles and gudgeons need to be located and holes drilled for them on the transom before paint goes on.
• Final sanding and any fairing work I want to do on the hull before primer goes on.
• work underneath the upturned hull. This is primarily (but not solely) trying to fair the fillets on the underside of the cabin top.