Forward bulkhead

[ocuyler]

Great work! Keep the progress reports coming!

[flyingfrizzle]

Lookin good! Love the supports under the deck, defiantly will be solid under your feet at the helm. She is coming together nicely. Curious, what did you use to glue the deck down? The net looks cool too by the way...

[chriselk]

FF,
we used the Bosch tubes, similar to 5200. I think it is the FS, fast set stuff. We left the deck screwed down 5 days before unscrewing. It took 12 tubes. Richard who is doing most of the work really did a very good job on the stringers so far as the meeting of the the stringers and the deck. Unlike the old sea crafts where there were inch gaps between, I dont think we even had a quarter inch where we could see using a flashlight and mirror. We glassed the deck to the liner where they meet on the sides. Been fairing that joint last two days, but I tore my shoulder few months ago and its tough for me now.

[linesider36]

Fantastic thread! What a boat this will be! Can't wait to see the finished product.

[FAS]

top of the line,we appreciate the time and material involved..go get some fish.soon.....
great Job guys.
.

[chriselk]

Four specs and a gray trout (weakfish)

[chriselk]

Not much visually, but a lot of work. We put the second layer of glass on the deck, faired, and faired the gutters. After sanding the superbuild we took the first picture.

The second picture is after some more fairing. Nothing spectacular.

Note the Cap. It has a bunch of holes in it. We are going to remove it and make it pretty. There are some places that have some rotten balsa which have to go.

[chriselk]

We removed the cap and flipped it over.

The cap had a huge cleat at the bow with a teak block backing. Most of the balsa had rotted in the bow and the rot on the sides was localized by the holes in the cap-naturally. We ground everything out. See first picture-I had a 24 grit disc from the big grinder disintegrate at speed and it went into my knee. I should have bought the variable speed grinder-thats too fast for a disc.

That meant removal of all of the balsa in the second half (stern) of the cap and several areas forward.

To rebuild the cap, we put half inch Coosa 20 in the bow area. We put glass and cabo under then glassed on top (17 oz always). We reinforced the bow areas since we are putting a windless up there. We used foam for small areas of rot that were isolated in the middle of a field of balsa. In the stern areas we used coosa and we filled all holes save on rod holder on each side since I liked that position and wanted to save it. Now we have coosa whereever we want to put a rod holder or cleat. For rod holder backing plates we are using some pieces of 3/16 glass from Parker boats (scrap they give away-useful in some places for backing). I apologize for not getting finished pictures of the upside down position of the cap. Basically we roughed it in, glass, faired and put topcoat on it. Looks very good for underside of a cap. Yes we are anal retentive sometimes.

I crawled under the cap and shot a couple of pictures to show the finished product. Not great pics sorry.

The first picture is forward. You can see we finished this before we put the cap back on. Who wants to sand upside down?

The second picture is a recent reinforcement of the corners of the transom under the cap. If you recall, we cut the cap just forward and we wanted to beef that area up. Plus a cleat and a rod holder go in the corners. We put in a piece of coosa to level out the previous coosa and to bring it to the corner (about a foot, 4 inches wide). Now that it was flush, we glued in a 20 inch piece of coosa to overlap and to tie it all together-this is the long gray board seen in the picture. We have not glassed it yet. We are not looking forward to glassing upside down, but it has to be done.

[chriselk]

We are dry fitting the transom fascia. This is a very hard part of the build, since so much is going on behind that front wall. Much of which must be done before final glue up of that panel.

Shown in the first three pics are dry fits early on in the construction (before we faired the deck). It should be noted that the liner has a right angle where the old transom made that turn. We saved an inch of that to guide our front panel. It should be noted if anyone is going this in the future, that it is not square to the floor. We made our panel square to the floor. That right angle is a good attachment point so we did save it.
The fourth pic is the port corner showing four holes for thru hulls in the side of the boat. One large baitwell overflow, two aft bilge pumps and a lower one for baitwell draining.

Also note the corners of the transom have access openings (those square holes) where the wiring, fuel lines and saltwater washdown come up. On the starboard side, will be housed the fuel filter and probably the washdown hose.

The fifth and sixth pics show that area. Note the nice Gemlux scupper system. There is a drain cover that is not installed yet. Really slick system-has a duck bill inside to prevent backwash.

The last picture shows where the read of the deck meets the transom. We had to leave little devits where the bracket washers and bolts fit.

I will get additional detail of the panel construction shortly.

Here are some more shots .

Some details of the corners and scuppers.

[chriselk]

We were very diligent in this construction due to the windlass going forward-we wanted it strong. Richard made a perfect fit bulkhead using coosa. See picture, it says a lot about his abilities.

It was glassed in of course all 'round.