Catchup

I seem to be falling behind with the blog entries. I think the main reason is that I want photos to help describe a process or an idea, but either don't take them (because I forget or the process is too messy to involve an expensive digital camera) or because I get a bit fed up with the whole download - crop - resize - rename - upload process involved in posting them.

So here's a text only catchup...

On Wednesday I managed to screw the remaining forward portion of deck in place and I removed the still-damp towel to let the wood dry whilst in its new curve.

On Thursday and Friday I was too tired and did nothing - sometimes you just need a break.

On Saturday I only had a couple of hours, so I marked out the position just ahead of the forward bulkhead where I wanted to mount an inspection hatch and then I unscrewed the deck. This took a while. I then trimmed the deck up to within half a carpenter's pencil width of the hull with a new neat cutting jigsaw blade. I then swapped to the thin curve-cut blade and cut out the inspection hatch hole. I also prepared a piece to become an eye for the bow toggle - more of this later.

On Sunday I epoxied in the toggle eye and primed out the underside of the deck with plain epoxy. This was a hassle because it was very windy and all sorts of dust and leaves blew into the garage entrance and stuck the the tacky deck. Also, the wet of the resin caused the deck to try and curve back in the opposite direction of what was required. I quickly mixed up some epoxy and microfibre blend which I applied to the inwales, cockpit stringers , forward deck beam and forward bulkhead. Then it was on with the deck and in with all those screws again. Earlier my son Samuel had helped me take all the screws out of the scrap pads, put shiny brown parcel tape on one side of the pads and then put all the screws back in again so screwing down the deck could be achieved whilst the epoxy was still workable.