While the rudder was cooking I sanded the coaming, smoothing over all the filled screw holes and particularly the repaired area where it was broken. Then I gave the coaming and the boat's inside a good vacuuming, since once the deck is on there are many spots I will never see again. That done, I laid the deck side pieces in place for a final fitting. I sanded their edges a bit to give a better fit against the coaming. When all looked right, I screwed the side pieces in place. I marked where the frames lie, since I'll need to apply epoxy to the underside of the deck in those places when I finally glue it down. The remaining job in preparing the deck to be glued and screwed was to fit the bow deck piece. Although it is a small piece, it was a devil's job to make because it takes a sharp bend across the boat. After breaking two previous pieces, I made one with closely spaced fore-and-aft grooves sawn into it. I clamped the piece into four clamps I had made with curves to match the required bend. Then I epoxied strips of fiberglass tape across the underside of the piece between the clamps, and left it alone for the last week. Today, when I unclamped it, it held the bent shape without further encouragement. I trimmed it up to fit around the coaming and to match up with the side pieces, working carefully because I sure didn't want to make a new piece. In the picture below it is lying in place with the right shape with nothing holding it down. If it is warm enough for epoxy tomorrow I will glue and screw the deck in place permanently. The next step there will be to fabric-cover the deck and coaming together.
Going back to the rudder, I found it was semi-hardened to the right degree that I could trim off the excess fabric and apply a second coat of epoxy.
When I glued and screwed the coaming in place yesterday, a happy coincidence was that where the coaming meets the transom, its bottom edge matches up precisely with the width of the top piece of the transom assembly, which shows in the picture above. Back when I made the transom I gave that no thought at all. The width of the piece was dictated by the size of the board it was cut from. Blind luck, but it looks good.
No comments:
Post a Comment