It seems like not a lot has happend over the past three weeks. We has a week off sailing between the Winter series and the Spring Twilight series but Laser sailing has started so there is something on three days a week.
Also slowing down progress is a repetitive strain injury which has meant working at a less vigerous rate so this post will be an update on the progress on the new Passion XI.
Another reason for the less frequent post is the poor quality of the internet in our district. Uploads in particular are painfully slow and many fail which means repeating the process until it works. To finish this post I had to use the mobile hot spot from my phone.
My priority is to get some glass over the deck so that the cockpit coamings can be installed over the glass. That means finishing all the deck elements including the gunwhale trim. Eighty percent of the gunwale capping is installed. This meant trimming back the excess plywood from the deck and fairing the gunwales and adding a 12 mm ply capping. Next the capping has to be planed back level with the plywood deck and sides and about this stage the repetitive strain injury took hold.
From here the search was for jobs that did not involve planing or hand sanding and while there a lots of these the appearance of progress is not so dramatic.
On one cold wet Monday I climbed under the gas bottle locker and glassed the two ply joins with two layers of 420 gsm double bias all covered with peel ply. Next I sanded the rudder port area, and applied generous coats of neat epoxy and a first coat of epoxy primer. I will finish off this area before completing the painting under the gas bottle locker as the painted surface is much more boat builder friendly than the raw epoxy glass.
Last Friday I picked up the chainplates and immediately drilled the holes for the forestay chainplate and did a first fit. The next day I completed the fit and routered a few millimetres off from the backing plate area so that the 200 mm bolts had enough thread showing for the nylock nuts. Then came the process of saturating the timber with neat epoxy and painting the anchor locker with four coats of epoxy.
It is hard to believe that it takes a week to install a forestay chainplate, paint the anchor locker, install the doublers and deck and after curing cut the anchor locker lid.
At different times I applied left over epoxy primer to various bare parts like the chart table area and at other times I prepared and painted area like the locker at the bow under the anchor locker. These all required painful feats of contortion and there is more to do.
