There is no external progress to show but inside the boat a lot of time has gone into fibreglassing the water tanks and glassing the keel floors to the plywood hull.
The tanks are lined with 6 oz epoxy saturated glass which has been sanded to remove loose ends, epoxy coated again and primed. The last stage will be to paint on the potable water tank liner. The settee front that form one side of the tanks have been grouted to the hull and glassed in with two layers of 6 oz glass on the inside of the tanks. On the external side they have been grouted to the hull and glassed in with two layer of 12 oz cloth. The 9 mm ply of the settee fronts running fore and aft lock into all the keel frames forming a very strong structure but the connection around each of the six keel floors has to be water tight so it requires some care. To be honest if it was just a cruising yacht I would have put the water tank under the V berth where there is a massive space. That is where it is in my Jeanneau 37 and the upside is that the space under the settee can be used for storage. Because we are keen on speed we are keeping the water tanks central where the weight will be more useful.
The keel floors have now been all glassed to the plywood hull with four layers of 12 oz cloth which is over 2 mm thick. Personally I think this is unnecessary since the floors are connected to the ply hull with solid meranti timber which is 80 mm wide. If the frames were glass over foam like we added to our Jeanneau SO37,Passion, then glassing to the hull is essential both for transmitting the shear forces in bending and for adding skin side strength. In the case of our Didi 40 Cr we have gone for a deep keel and the extra loads are fully adjusted for by widening the laminated timber floors from 70 mm to 80 mm. I have added 2 mm of glass to the frames to increase the factor of safety. This I did on the shop floor before installing the floors in the hull 18 months ago. The intention was to add 2 mm of glass to the external hull again as an increase in the factors of safety. Between the designer and me we have double up on the glass. He wanted 2 mm of glass over the keel floors on the inside as well as all the glass included in the extra factors of safety calculation. I thought that was overkill based on my calculations but needed to build according to the drawings. I tried to negotiate to put the extra 2 mm of glass on the external side of the hull where it is more effective and laid up a full 4 mm of glass across the hull centre line in the area of the keel floors. The designer would not agree so we have also the 2 mm tabbing the frames into place. I guess is that the factor of safety is now over 5 compared to a design requirement of around 3 and it has been only an extra 20 man days to do all the reinforcing. That time includes glassing the individual floor with 2 mm of glass, applying eight layers to the hull in the keel area while it was upside down and glassing in the floors from the inside on my hands and knees.
Most of the glassing is completed including the front floor which is now tabbed to the ply skin with 2 mm of glass.