My rotator cuff injury has slowed down the boat building because planing and sanding is particularly painful. At the same time the weather has been very good for boatbuilding with days of fine warm conditions. These ideal conditions has allowed me to finish installing the gunwhale capping all the way to the bow and with the aid of some painkiller I have been able to plane and torture board the capping down to the final profile.
When I say final I mean until I have a second and third look at it and get the torture board working overtime. After the planing and sanding I have filled all the screw holes on the gunwales and most of the deck but the final part of the deck has been delayed due to a return of wintery conditions.
One satisfying piece of work was trimming the top of the bow to match the 45 degree angle of the gunwale capping. This took a bit of width off the appearance at the bow and it looks positively handsome now.
Today it was bitterly cold on the building site so I retreated to the garage and fabricated a jig so that I could mass produce some stringer doublers. These are small plywood elements that go over the bulkheads where the stringers pass through. The other option is to fillet the stringers but I find this difficult and a straight fillet between the plywood doublers looks neater and takes about the same time.
The doubler production was so efficient that I used 9 of them on the bulkhead B join to the deck.
Filling the screw holes in the deck prior to glassing the deck has been time consuming and to get a break from the bending over I retreated to the transom where I could work standing upright. Here I sanded the primary epoxy coat, filleted the inside corners and once cured routered the inside edge. This was topped off with a second coat of epoxy making sure that the end grain of the plywood was thoroughly saturated.
The weather is not worrying me with respect to the completion time as there are plenty of inside and outside jobs to match the conditions and today’s several hours fitting doublers to the stringers on bulkhead B was a cosy job inside the hull.
On the sailing front we have had a couple of good results with Passion X in the Greenwich Flying Squadron twilight series. The first of these a week ago was a favourable series of lifts on the windward work to Goat Island which kept us near the front of the fleet and the second this week was the added weight on the rail which improved our windward speed. Our handicap is now the same as one of the J112E yachts so we will have to work hard for anymore good handicap wins.
