Frame Complete

The frame is now complete:



Bulkhead C has a doubler to give some meat for the screws when I come to fit the watertight hatch:



And I need to move on to marking out the side and bottom panels. The only place I have space is up:





A couple of long battens, 2 slings and 4 carabiners from my climbing days, some parcel tape and up she goes. This gives me space to mark out on ply sheets that have been pre-cut in half lengthways - careful study of the nesting diagram allowed me to solve a storage problem earlier.



I've now got half the 4 bottom panels marked and cut out (thanks to a brief break in the appalling weather we're having in the UK this winter allowing to get outside to cut panels) and will do the other 2 tomorrow; the weather forecast is dry.

More Work on the Frame

Holidays over, back at work - I've had some time to make some progress over the last couple of weekends.

Last weekend, I got the trunking that houses both the daggerboard and mast wells assembled:


 (there are 19 separate components in this assembly - I used nearly that many clamps)

This is the key assembly of the whole frame and includes the bow stringer. Assembly was a three stage process needing patience as I waited for the epoxy to go off before being able to move on to the next stage.

Here's the result:



This weekend, I moved on to bulkheads A and B.

Bulkhead A is in 2 parts:



and needed some careful dry assembly and pre-setting of supporting cleats to ensure that the alignment was correct:





I then moved on to bulkhead B, which is the main load bearing cross-boat structure in the boat and forms the forward wall of the cockpit/well:



So that's the forward half of the frame complete.

Golant Gaffer

Up near (or even currently at) the top of my list of 'possibles' for the post-retirement build is Roger Dongray's Golant Gaffer design.  There's a bit more info on the Classic Marine website here:

http://www.classicmarine.co.uk/details.asp?Name=Golant+Gaffer

Given my height (I'm 6'4"/195cm), I had some concerns about the sitting headroom in the cabin and how much back support the cockpit coamings offered. I was keen to see a GG in the flesh, so to speak, and put out a request on the Wooden Boat Forum.  Paul, the owner and builder of Blue Moon, very kindly offered to let me look her over and go out for a short sail.

What a beautiful small boat:

Paul built her with a raised (by about 4") coachroof, which he designed himself after consulting with Roger Dongray.  I think that the aesthetics are superb.  From the point of view of my concerns, she had ample sitting headroom in the cabin and the coamings were just the right height and angle.

We went out for a couple of hours sail down Chichester Harbour - great fun; she is a sweet-handling boat.

So the GG is till up there on my list.  Thanks Paul !

Keeping Epoxy Warm

The brand of epoxy I use (Professional Epoxy Coatings from Fyne Boat Kits), needs to be kept above 14 degrees Centigrade for the pumps to work and ideally quite a bit warmer than that (about 20 degrees C) for it to flow properly.

Living in the UK, astride the European end of the Gulf Stream, our temperate winters don't merit heated - or even insulated - garages. My current workshop has single skin brick walls, a single skin metal 'up and over' door and a large roof space under an uninsulated slate roof.  This means that it is usually within a couple of degrees of the ambient temperature.

In our bit of UK, ambient in winter can range from -15 to + 12 degrees C, so I need something to keep the epoxy warm (storage inside the house not welcomed by the management for anything other than unopened containers).  In the past, I have kept it on a shelf above an oil-filled electric radiator; this worked, but the resultant utility bill hurt.

My current solution is to take a cheap plastic storage box (the type with hinged flaps as a lid) and mount it on the wall with a 60W light bulb hung from the top:

There is some old carpet draped over the top to reduce heat loss and the epoxy containers are sitting on top of a padded envelope with some airspace below to give some more insulation and get them closer to the bulb. 

With the bulb on all the time, this keeps the box at a constant 20 degrees C - ideal.

A couple of refinements:

The bulb is connected to the supply through a plug-in RCD trip switch as a safety measure:

and the 'doors' of the box are covered in black duck tape to reduce the incidence of helpful neighbours calling to say 'you've left a light on in your garage'. So this:

reduces to this: