Cockpit coaming panels

To make the flanges to glue the top of the coaming to, I made some molds of cheap insulation foam. Like this.

Then I rounded the corner of the foam a bit to bend the tape round the corner, laminated a piece of tape on the foam and put the foam+ tape in place with some screws.

Final result wasn't pretty but in my opinion good enough. After all it's just a gluing flange and no one will ever see it. Top held in place with some woodblocks+screws to let the glue set.
Almost ready.... I have to tidy it up a bit and sand corners round etc. After that it will be covered with one piece of cloth.
To solve the problem with the opening in the coaming-storage-floor at the beam mount, I made a small 5 cm high wall in that area to prevent water in the storage compartiment to run into the main hull. Like this the water won't run into the boat, but air can flow from within the hull through the gap at te mount to the (still to cut) hatch in the coaming.

The idea is like this the coaming-storage will act as a sort of ventilation-box. I hope it's clear what I mean.

cockpit coaming.

Cockpit coaming in place with temporary wood blocks on the in- and outside. I used a level to mark the outline of the inner side of the coaming to the outer side of the coaming (so the top will sit level - hopefully).
To fit the top I need to make some flanges, but how? I think it's a bit tight to do it with a mold (very difficult to get underneath with tape, brush and putty). For places like this I'm tempted to just glue a piece of wood to the inside to make the inside join, but I will resist the temptation and think of something else.
In the coaming-storage area there is a big hole with direct acces to the quarter-bed-area in the hull (as can be seen on the first photo of the last post - you can see the light shining from below). I'll have to do something about this, as the coaming-storage will be accessible from the cockpit and will probably collect a lot of rainwater and I don't want it running into the main hull. To be continued....

port cockpit seat

Port cockpit fronts and cockpit seat are glued in place. I decided not to make mold flanges to glue the seat on, but to tape all joints through the hatches in the cockpit fronts, as this is probably a bit stronger than gluing to a flange.
I'll first finish the whole port side before moving on to the starboard side, so I can first discover the best way to do it and not make the same mistakes twice......
... like forgetting to bevel and round the edges of the mount-gap in the cockpitseat prior to fitting: now I have to grind the edge from the inside/underside. Not fun work.
Forward hatch opening has been cut out. I'll probably just bed the hatch on some putty to keep it as low as possible, and not make a big foam/glass coaming.

cockpit panels

With the laminations on one beam mount ready, I can move on fitting the cockpit panels. Something I've been looking forward to do for a long time.
I used a router to cut out the hatches in the cockpit seat fronts.
It worked well, it's a neater job than working with the jigsaw. A bit work to make the mold, but after that it's easy and fast to route out the four identical hatches.
Trial fit of the panels. After only a little bit of trimming all panels fit well.
A bit of trimming and removing of excess glassfiber makes the beam mount look a lot better. It's a shame I didn't remove the hygrometer (black thing) when taking the picture. It's blocking the view on my, ahem, excellent glassing job.
Filling the gap between the hull and the molds from the outside before removing the molds paid of: a nice straight edge to work on in the future.
Thursday I will take a day of and my brother will come and help me, so I hope to make good progress that day. Till then no time for building.

paranoia & "hey stupid" part 4

The building is slowing down lately, mainly because I've been neglecting my normal work a bit in favor of the building, and now have to catch up with some tasks at the office. Also I've lost a lot of time just standing and looking at the mounts, wondering if they were glued in place accurately enough.

I found it harder than I thought to get the job done right. After removing the jigs I found out the rear beam mounts were a massive 1 - 1,5 degrees out of line (vertically). I probably relied too much on the jigs and should have worked harder to check with the level. Stupid, stupid, I know.
Problem is the area which can be used best for this check is the beam bolting area, and this area is covered by the jigs when you glue the mounts to the hull.

The devil inside kept saying "Don't bother, just let it be or pull the mount in line a bit when laminating the walls of the mounts." but in the end I probably did the clever thing (at least for my ease of mind). I cut the bracket bolting area loose. With the mounts only fitted to the beam bulkhead, which has a bit of play as it is only fixed on the bottom side, I could quite easily position the mounts leveled right (few mm repositioning at the top) and glued them again to the hullside.

Then it was finally time to do the lamination. Looks quite messy like this, doesnt it? Next post I'll show the mount cleaned and trimmed, guess it will look much better.

My cunning plan is to fill the outside gaps with the mold still in place. This should give a nice clean & straight outer edge to work on when doing the outside laminations.
I had another "paranoia" moment when I put a G10-tube into the UFS pivot holes, and noticed on one mount the tube was not pointing straight forward, but was clearly visible bearing away to the center of the boat. This was caused by the two holes in the mount being about 1 mm (2,5 degrees) out of line.
Being - as I know now: overly - concerned about any error and misalignment in the folding system, I mailed Ian Farrier about it. Got a very quick and comprehensive answer, explaining among other things it's difficult to get the alignment of those holes exactly right every time, and given the play in the bushing of the pivot-pin it's not necesarry to alter or fix it. If I want I can fix it though......but I think I'll pass.

"Stuck on you"

.....Guess I'm on my way.... hum hum hum
I didn't have time this week to get much work done, but yesterday I glued the beam mounts in place. So now they're stuck on the hull and I hope at all the right angles and distances.

I checked with Ian Farrier about the protruding area at the front mount (see foregoing post), and this is indeed how it's supposed to be.
He sent a very helpful sheet with some distances to check, as I did, and all was well. Having this kind of backup by the designer while building is a big advantage and adds a lot of value to the plans, which are by the way already excellent and very good value for money in their own right.

I do not have a clear idea how much misalignment can be mended when installing the beams. Reading the plans is not really reassuring ('1 mm error is acceptable' - 'oh that's nice, I only erred 0,5 mm'). Honestly I find it hard to believe I can build all these big pieces together with this kind of accuracy. I just do the best I can and hope the best will be good enough.

As an extra to the standard jigs I made a square panel between the front and aft beam mounts, to be absolutely sure the centerpoint fore and aft is accurate and to be sure the mounts are all aligned square. With this and all the other jigs in place, I couldn't think of anything to improve the accuracy of the alignment so it was gluing time.
I spy with my little eye and it is....
...a piece of foam in the upper strut recess, sanded flush to use as a mold for putty-filling + protection from putty getting into the recess.

Looks like the A-team is building a boat, right? We taped some foam as mold plates to assist the filling. It didn't come out quite the way I hoped, but this will be easily mended with one extra go of putty from the outside.

Beam mounts, part 2

Me and my brother started cutting out the beam mount openings. It's a bit scary to cut such big openings in the hull, but it needs to be done.

It took us a long time to get the hull level. We worked on one support at a time, using two car jacks to fine tune the height. The topside of the straight, long, piece of MDF you can see sticking outside the hull was our reference while leveling. This piece runs through the hull to both sides, and is clamped on the inside at the right height - that is: at the gunwaleline which is (and should be!) marked on all the beam bulkheads. Maybe it's possible to use a laser level to mark all the lines at the right height on the sloping areas, but we did this low tech with a tube of water and a yardstick hanging or standing at the right distance from the top of the crossboard (see above picture). Hold one end of the tube near the yardstick and the other near the hull, make sure the water is level with the end of the yardstick, and make some marks on the hull. Connect the dots and you have a - granted: not very accurate, but accurate enough - level line to work with. Trial fit of mount. We thought that I had made a very, very,very, very big mistake somewhere earlier on when we first looked at the result. The outer end of the bracket area on the front of the front beam mount was not inside, but a few cm outside the hull. The stick I'm holding indicates where the 'wall' of the beam mount will be formed. I was very concerned as I couldn't find a clear reference to this gap in the plans.
That was too much for our nerves, and we decided to call it a day. Back home I was relieved to see that the F22 build for Oliver doms has the same protruding area on the front beam mount assembly. To be absolutely sure this is how it is meant to be I mailed Ian. I don't want to take any chance fitting these important parts. Now just hope and pray it's ok.

Things I have to attach in a certain way to the hull, part 1.

It wasn't too hard and actually good fun to laminate extensions on some things I have to attach to the hull. To do the topside extensions I found it easy to clamp the things to some timber with some extra pieces of something as a spacer. I'm not going to show you exactly how I did it. You just have to experiment yourself and you'll probably see.
As other builders I didn't want to drill holes in these things to attach the mold, and used clamps instead on the first two things. This is pointless. The things have to be drilled anyway to attach some other things later on. So it's much easier - as I did with two other similar things - to just drill the holes and attach the mold with bolts.
I tried to find a bolt with the correct thickness to attach the things to something else. Apparently, a bolt with this certain thickness is not readily available in Europe, probably because we use the metric system and not feet, inches, stones, pounds, miles and the like. Anyway, instead I used a tube with the correct diameter and a bolt fitting exactly in it. Succes! Anyone building in Europe can have mine to save some time and money once I'm done with the abovementioned things. Just let me know.
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