Here I've turned over the whole bottom. To do this I lifted it a bit to slide out the saw horses and position one on just the ends. Then I slowly turned it over. I did this in order to install the centerboad trunk.
I dry fitted the trunk then wetted the surfaces out with epoxy. I then laid a bed of thickened epoxy, then pressed the trunk in place. I finished by installing 10 lag screws. After it set up I smeared thickened epoxy in the sides of the slot. When it dried I filed it down, then put another layer of epoxy. The idea is to get a water tight seal and smooth surfaces.
After the centerboard trunk had time to set, I turned the bottom back over and applied two coats of epoxy paint. This is BLP Industrial Epoxy I purchased locally. The slot sort of reminds me of the Stargate in Arthur C Clark's book 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Next I got out the #3 bulkhead from my big pile on the porch. I needed to place a plank between the bulkhead and the aft end of the centerboard trunk as specified in the plans. I decided to glue the plank to the bulkhead and wait until tomorrow to install the bulkhead.
Here I've glued and bolted in the stem and stern post. I've also braced these to make sure they are absolutely vertical. During dry fit I noticed they had a bit of side to side rock. If I screw this up then I would have to remove these pieces and destroy them in the process or I would end up with a lopsided boat.
The brace in the last picture did not look ridiculous enough so I put in the one shown here. More importantly I needed to brace the actual stem instead of frame #0. Frame #0 sits on the chine logs and I want to make sure that glue joint is set right. If the stem is set vertical I found that the frame #1 was vertical without any bracing on it. I'm looking forward to a lot of cross checking when I have all the bulkheads installed and get ready to install the shear clamp. I'm thinking I will fashion the shear clamp of 3 laminations of 1 1/2 x 1/2 to get the correct dimensions. There are two ways I could go on this:
- Glue it in place then check all the bulkhead alignments before securing it for good.
- Glue the first strip in, checking all the bulkhead alignments, then glue on additional strips to build it up.