Saturday is normally a sailing day when I hitch up the Laser and head to Gosford but I have had a bit of a frustrating week with my mega project so that took a higher priority. The tasks for the day were not overtaxing but fate had other plans.
Before I could prime my transom to protect the timber from the weather I had to router a 48 mm wide 12 mm deep slot for the knee. Just a few minutes into this task and the faithful old Ryobi router died. It had a good life building a lot of yachts and I possibly pushed it a bit too hard but these are handyman tools, not life long assets.
A quick trip to Bunnings secured a new, more powerful one but one that fitted my router table well.
Armed with new router and a new found respect for looking after it I soon finished the three tasks, the transom, the mast post and the stem bulkhead.
The stem bulkhead needed further attention as I had to move the station position 12 mm from where I had planned to mount it and that meant a 4 mm trim to the shape. In the calm of Friday evening post the Balmain afternoon pursuit race I set up the stem bulkhead on the kitchen bench and carefully remarked all the positions for the new trim line. That done the execution on Saturday was a mundane if careful task.
The dilemma before me was whether to epoxy saturate the laminate cabin beams to protect them during the construction of whether to start the epoxy primer surfacer on the plywood bulkheads.
As it was a warm day and good for epoxy work I opted for the epoxy saturation first as I could stack the frames and do multiple laminated beams where the white epoxy primer would need shuffling around on the front lawn.
With three bulkheads stacked on the garage floor I was able to get the rest away for the weekend and will leave the white epoxy for another day.
Meanwhile out on the lawn and out of the garage to give me some working room were bulkheads waiting for white primer which never came today. Perhaps Monday will be kinder to these bulkheads
