I could not resist starting on the radius chine moulding before all my other fiddly bits have been finished. To be fair my list of jobs has been whittled down and the main outstanding item is painting inside the water tanks while the top and side are accessible. I want to leave the least painting possible for after the hull is turned as painting epoxy upside down inside a tank is not a pleasant task.
By starting at the transom with the moulded ply planking I should have enough time to complete the painting.
What I have finished includes fixing the water tank tops, filletting all the corners in the tank and glassing over the fillets. That includes glassing the fillets where the tank top, which is also the settee seat, joins the hull. All but the last glass has been sanded ready for the epoxy paint. While in the tank I filleted the stringers as it is easier while there is good access.
Before the laminating of the radius chine can begin the tangent stringers have to be faired to the radius. The layers of ply give a good indication that the bevel on the ply is even and a long fibreglass battern wrapped around the chine provides a good planing guide. For good measure the 12 mm ply on the tangent stringer can be eyeballed along the hull and a much longer fibreglass battern is useful for checking the fore and aft alignment.
It helps to have a very sharp plane and to that end I sharpened the blades many times a day.
I have been reserving the morning for planing the tangent stringers as it is a quiet task and gives the body a good workout before starting the noisy machines cutting temporary clamps and cutting ply strips.
At a rough guess with each plank 300 mm wide and 12000 millimeters of boat there are 40 planks a side for one layer so 160 planks to finish the hull. That is conservative for the from third will be planked with four layers of 3 mm ply to get around the very tight and powerfull forward chines. That adds 50 planks to the task so 210 planks in total.
I did look back at the photos of the build on Passion X and noted that this phase took three months. I think that I can do better than that but we will see.
Meanwhile back on the race track we are missing crew weight. Yes for the three crew we had on the rail we are down 0.2 knots in boat speed. Add to that the more challenging handicap we were dealt after a couple of wins and we are back at the rear of the handicap results.
Clearly I got ahead of myself giving praise to the handicapper a couple of weeks back.
The results on Wednesday were instructive as the two yachts with the smallest jibs for the day came first and second. Before the race I did say that Fidelis must know something and that something was that the wind would be stronger than forecast. On the hard reaching leg we lacked crew weight on the rail so I am looking forward to having the new yacht on the water in a couple of seasons where the extra 450 kg on the keel will compensate for the lack of crew on the rail.