Boat Builder Central - Builder Forums

mineratt wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 11:21 am
The boat will eventually have a center console, 40hp outboard, and go out of Morro Bay.

Sweet. I dragged my HMD19 down to Morro bay last May, it is a cool little spot with good access.

I finished stitching the panels on the boat. The bow was a bit of a pain and required a lot of stitching and re-stitching to get the four quadrants aligned close enough. They could still be pulled together a little more evenly but for now i will let the wood relax a little and step back for a little perspective.

Things that i have learned so far;
If you are gluing the panels together on a concrete floor, they will take forever to setup if the floor is cold - even if the air temperature is acceptable.
When I put the transom together I put wetted mat or cloth between each panel, when I put a weight on top of them to sandwich them all together they slid all over the place, Two skinny nails (partially imbedded) cured the sliding, then the wrights were no problem. I used that approach with the stringers and they went together the first time.
I miss-cut the 13 degrees on the transom side of the strong back, after aligning everything I placed the transom on the strong back and wedged the base (tope side) until 13 degrees and alignment with the stringers and "knees" was achieved, then locked it down.
I marked the centerline of each frame/form for alignment on the strong back (ran a string down the center just below the frames/forms. Then I aligned the keel line both optically and with a string. The two methods were not identical, i averaged between the two and took measurements of the extensions off the sides of the strong back rails - they were not perfectly even either because of a slight warp in the 2x8s. the warp was a little side to side with the up/down being very straight.

The next step will be the "weld" gluing.

There is quite a bit of spring tension at the bow. My spot welds broke when I cut my zip ties and I had to redo it. A short strip of 6in fiberglass tape epoxied down there works really well to resist that spring tension while doing the initial spot welds.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Edit: A picture is worth 1000 words

That makes sense and I think that I will go down that route. So after the initial "weld' is set i will sand and round out the exposed bow portion and add some initial tape there which i will feather out later when I do the overall seam taping. I think that i will extend this to the portion where the bottom of the hull meats the sites at the bow as it is under a lot of stress/flex. I thank you for the pointer, this makes sense and will save a bit of time.

I took the advice to heart and put a little cloth over the bow joints. I want to make sure that this is fully set before I start taking out the stitches, I thought it might need a little more time than the rest of the seams. The epoxy is a little slower in setting up than I had anticipated.

I finished the primary "welding" or bead laying on the seams. I used a 200 CC feed syringe to pump the goop into the gaps, it worked pretty well, one fillup for each of the three seams. I let the initial epoxy glue soak into the wood for several hours (it is a little cold in in the garage) before filling in the seams with the goop so it should be pretty good, this afternoon i will go back over it before it completely cures and add any extra to the spots that might not have bridged the gaps fell through.

I pulled the ties and sanded the excess off. I trued the sides initially so that I would have something to round off that would not present an elevated bump or edge on the radius. Then i added a little additional filler for all of the holes and gaps.

The joints are all sanded and rounded. The tape edges are all measured and marked. Its ready for the joints to all be taped.

Looking good! Ready just in time for the weekend.

It has been a while since I applied fiberglass tape or cloth, especially on a vertical surface so I may have slightly over applied the epoxy causing it to drip all over the place. I will just have to sand it all off once it cures to prep for the cloth. It took approximately two hours to apply which is about average from what I have read here.