sand, sand, sand, sand, bacon, eggs and sand

13 combined hours to sand the epoxy coat!

We put on the first undercoat as a kind of sacrificial coat, to show us all the holes and checks that needed filling and we couldn't see before. Then, of course, we sanded most of it off.

The distressed look. Maybe it's okay in a kitchen but I'd rather not see it on my boat.

laminations

We’re laminating the tiller, bowsprit and traveller arch out of Fijian kauri and sapele.

Our cabinet maker friend Murray Jordan ripped and thicknessed the timber for us.

The tiller and traveller arch are laminated.

And the Bowsprit (clamping it up felt like playing foosball!). We’re building it a little larger than plans as we’ll be flying a gennaker off it.

coaming stringer & epoxy coating

It’s taken four weeks to complete all the coving in the corners. Now it’s done we've glued on the coaming stringer. (We didn’t want it to get in the way before.)

We’ve gave the whole cockpit a coat of epoxy resin, and two coats on high wear areas like floor, seat tops and seat fronts. This is really hard and should protect the timber as well as being a great primer.

Joe dries the boat after scrubbing the amine blush off from the epoxy.

The framing is all ready for the deck to go on. I’ve planed the gunwale and coaming stringers down.

seat radius & ancient epoxy

Well with three months to go our deadline is pretty tight. The main sail has been completed and the others will be soon too. The spars have been ordered. We’re putting in a lot of hours. The majority are being sucked up in sanding and coving. Our biggest problem is the epoxy we have to clean up from when we were building.

Having built boats before, we preached the “clean up all the epoxy as you go” sermon to ourselves. We thought we’d done a reasonable job until now when we’re trying to finish off. One – two year old epoxy is very hard.

We’ve glued the seat fronts on now, and built in the back seat. We’ve departed from the plans here. Normally the seat tops overhang the fronts by about two inches.
As you can see we’ve sloped the fronts and are rounding the corner off. This should give us more space, be more comfortable and make her a bit racier.

Before and after.

seats

We've glued the seat tops on. Coving underneath wasn't the most comfortable..

We've put the skirts round the boat to protect the paint work (no we're not hiding a HULA ;-).

We glued doublers to the back of the seat fronts for the inspection ports and to strength them.

Well how else were we going to hold them in place? The supermarket had a special on clamps :o)

sunny side up

Here’s hoping she spends most of her time this way up.

turning point

Time to turn the boat back over - with the help of Mr Joe Muscle…

Photo by the six year old cabin boy, Jesse.

And these by Able Seaman Joseph (10).

We had to make some modifications to the jig, as the boat has grown a keel while it was upside down. We're a bit worried about how hard the paint is, (ten days since the top coat) but hopefully it won't stick.

gloss

Painting the hull is finally finished! 4-6 Undercoats
3 Topcoats - Altex Isotal Enamel