Happy Trails

Well, at least one thing is actually done: the trailer.



I wanted to be sure the trailer was ready before the boat was painted so that it could be flipped right onto the trailer. To finish off the trailer, I painted the bunks with an oil-based paint (grey to match the galvanizing) and then glued polyethylene foam to the supports that would contact the hull. A little "googling" suggested that plain old Weldwood Contact Cement would do the trick in gluing a normally tough-to-adhere polyolefin like polyethylene to the wood. At six hours in so far, so good. :) Now if the boat fits in there I'll be all set.

I also got another coat of epoxy on the hull, but that looks just like it did two days ago before I sanded so I didn't post a picture.

To do list...

Lots of little things going on.

As you can see below the boat was flipped and a couple of weeks ago Traci and I got the entire hull covered in 6oz glass cloth. We used a 60" wide roll (from US Composites) which covered from the centerline down to the rail with a couple inches to spare. I had originally order a 25yd roll. Early we glassed the topsides, and when we got to the hull we were exactly 1ft short. Typical. :) This was not a huge problem since there was extra cloth near the bow. So we seamed in the port half of the transom. I was fairly precise when I was doing the topsides; 30yds or so would give you ample margin for error.



Since the boat is upside-down, it took the opportunity to create a couple of bunks for the trailer out of 1/4" meranti and 1/2" doug fir. If I did it again I would go with 3/4" ply for the uprights. As it is, I added a couple of vertical pieces scrap cedar to each bunk to stiffen them up a touch.

In other news, my standing rigging arrived today from Rigging Only. Looks good! I am going with stainless rigging, rather than the fancy ($$) poly stuff. I had rigging only swage the t-balls on the upper ends and they left the lower end raw for attachment to a Hi-Mod stud which will go into the turn buckle body.

On the immediate to do list is getting a second coat of epoxy on the port side of the hull, getting a few small spots along the centerline faired, and then shooting some primer.

God, I want to go sailing...