Moonfish Hull Progress

It's been well over two months since I last posted.  While I've not been blogging, I have been making a fair amount of progress on the Moonfish hull.

This is where I've got to so far:

The hull is structurally complete, with all seams epoxy taped.  The cockpit was finished and painted before fitting the deck.  It has a watertight stowage compartment aft (the two forward hatches are for ventilation of the hull when stored), a hiking toe strap (made from an old car seat belt) and non-slip tape on the sole.  The paint is white domestic exterior gloss over two layers of epoxy. There is a layer of fibreglass on the sole to add strength and abrasion resistance.

So how did I get to here ?

 I had already pre-cut the four bottom panels, which now had a trial fit. No problems with the bow pair, but there was an issue with the after pair:

I decided to make a fillet for this gap. The first step was to mark out a rough template onto a length of paper (fax roll):

Once I had an oversized fillet cut from ply with the jigsaw, I then refitted the panels and took measurements of the width at 10cm (4") intervals, marked them onto the fillet and cut again with a Japanese hand saw. It was then a question of gradually planing it to fit until I had this:

The panels were then tacked into place with staples, trimmed to fit and the daggerboard slot opening cut. All the seams were then taped with parcel tape:

The hull was then turned over and the deck removed:

Then - a lot of filleting and epoxy taping .........

 This is not really exciting stuff (I much prefer the woodwork), but here are some photos:

Thrilling, eh ?

That done, I began fitting the cleats on all the bulkheads that both give them additional strength and provide bonding/bearing surfaces for the deck:

In the last shot, you can also see the additional 12mm support pad (so 24mm in all - say 1") for the rudder gudgeons.

The end result looked like this:

All this while, the deck panel (really flexible & flimsy-seeming) had been stored off to one side - you can just see it on the left in the pic above.  Now it was back on (upside down) to work out where all the deck fittings were going to go (I used the Sunfish class rules diagrams to guide me here), so that I could fit the doublers to support them:

I had to try to take account also of where the bulkheads and stringers would be, which I didn't quite get right (I forgot the width of the cleats in several places) and had to do some refitting when it came to fitting the deck right way up.

Then it was time to re-fit and epoxy glue all the side cleats (which had been on the deck when it was used as a building jig for the sides).  The builders notes said to use temporary screws to hold them while the epoxy set, but I used staples as they are faster and leave smaller holes to be filled and faired.  I put them in through bits of old ice cream cartons which made later extraction much easier.  Not my trick - one I found on the net somewhere - but it worked a treat:

Next came the paint job on the cockpit and watertight compartment, together with the fittings for which I needed access to both sides of bulkheads B and C at each end of the cockpit (the hatches and the hiking strap fittings):

The deck was to come next.  I really struggled to get it aligned properly with it in one piece. So,after much thought and with considerable trepidation,

....... I cut it in half again !

I realised that the join fell exactly astride bulkhead B at the forward edge of the cockpit.  This would give it more than adequate support, even if it did give me some minor fairing issues later on.

The deck was then glued down in two halves, held temporarily with screws into the cleats and staples into all the bulkhead and stringer cleats:

The stern half went on first; the bow half is shown above.

Once the screws and staples were removed, I planed and sanded all the seams to get a 1/2" radius before the taping work began again (exciting photo series warning):

So, there we are !  Next up will be sheathing the bottom.

There's some stuff to come, as well, about making the daggerboard and buying and refurbishing a 1960s-vintage trailer for the 'Fish.