hatches and cockpit floor

This weekend Karel Michielsen http://home.ozonline.com.au/f41_sail33/ paid me a visit (he was in Holland meeting family). It was really nice to talk to such an experienced builder. I'll try to pass on some of the tips he gave me in this blog. One of those tips was to put a sanding disk (grit 40 or 80)on the angled grinder and use that to touch up fiberglass seams, spills and generally do all other kinds of sanding.
Maybe this is no news for some, but I had never thought of using the grinder for this kind of work. In Holland the angled grinder is considered by most people to be just a tool for cutting & grinding metal and not a sanding tool. Anyway, I did some tests with the grinder and with some practice it indeed is a perfect tool for cleaning up fiberglass, cutting out bubbles and smoothing tape edges.

Anchor locker hatch will lie on some supports cut out of some leftover sandwich panel.
This is how it will look. I'll not bolt through the hinges. Instead I'll drill oversised holes in the hatch and deck, dig out a bit of foam and then fill with HD putty. Then I'll tap a thread to bolt the hinges with short bolts.
I made a small foam coaming for the forward hatch. Has to be touched up a bit and then I'll put some glass on.
Cockpit floor still has to be doubled. Good opportunity to get rid of the scrap foam pieces. Some of those pieces got a little sunburnt during the last two years. The divinycell is apparently not very UV resistant....

minor progress

Not much progress last few weeks due to a holiday with the family and nice weather (been sailing my hobie 16 instead of building).

It's getting time to start thinking about the hardware/sails. I'm trying to find some affordable sheet tracks, travellers, tracks & slides for the hatch etc. but that seems impossible in the marine field.
In an attempt to save some money I bought a Rutgerson main sheet traveller second hand, but I'm having second thoughts about it. This traveller is very beefy (and heavy) and way overkill for my boat. I'll probably sell it and buy a new midrange Harken traveller.
All interior panels are taped. I'll leave the interior very basic first, and will decide later (while sailing) what works best. I'm happy I chose the centerboard: cabin looks quite roomy.
Cutting holes is always a scary part. I used a lot of time trying to figure out the right shape and came up with this. Still not really certain if this is 'it', but I guess it's better to just cut it and move on..... Now there's no way back.......

main hatch 2

Sawing the front end of the main hatch (angled 45 degrees). After that I screwed a piece of foam to the edge to act as a mold plate, and laminated the inner front side with a big filet in the corners to be able to sand a nice radius in the corners before laminating the exterior.
End result (roughly cut)...
Other angle....

Main hatch part 1

I'm using the hatch cutout-section of the deck to make the hatch. This seems much easier than making a hatch from scratch.
First step is to glue some foam round the edges to get to the required size.
After that I made a mold to laminate the sides and aft side of the hatch. This leaves me some time to think of a way to mold&laminate the front end of the hatch.
Sides & aft-side laminated. Finally something other builders might consider: in the plans the deck stringer is positioned almost against the hatch coaming. That may be the strongest solution, but might be difficult to laminate & get fair. After seeing the picture on the site of Oliver Doms of the coaming-stringer edge I decided to make the hatch cutout 1 cm less deep to get a bit of working space between the coaming and the stringer. Guess this won't hurt the 'integrity' of my boat.

side faired and windows cutout

After glassing the wingnet tubes I could start to fair the cabin sides. First step is to put on some lines of putty with a candybag, and sand them flush to act as a guide for putting on the main layer of putty.After that the putty is put on. I do this in two layers (second layer when the first layer has not totally cured), as the first layer is usually a lot lower than the guiding lines. After that sanding with diagonal movement of the sanding board. I was afraid the laminate of the wingnet tube would be hard to fair, but that turned out to be very easy.
Got to get the hang of the fairing a bit again. I put on a too thin layer of putty. While fairing I (almost) sanded through the layer on a couple of spots too quickly, making it very time consuming to finish the sanding in these areas (got to be very careful round these spots).
To mark the 2,5 cm overlap of the window on the hull it's easiest to just hold the window template 2,5 cm lower and mark the cutout line.
Final result...
I will first fill the edges, and then sand them to get rid of some small jigsawing-swaying.
In the process of cutting out parts for this boat I have ruined countless jigsaw-blades - till now. I switched to using an abrasive jigsaw blades in stead of normal blades, and this works perfect. I read this tip on the tips&tricks section (plywood/glass) of Michael Leneman's site www.multimarine.com.

forward bulkhead flange + window templates

I used some leftover divinycell foam to make the mold for the forward beam bulkhead flange. Worked OK, you've only got to use the heat gun a bit to form the lower corner. After laminating the flange I'll use the foam to double the cockpit floor. Trial fit of the templates for the windows. Plans state they should be placed vertical in the middle of the flat side..... ehm right...which middle? We decided to put the aft end of the aft window in the middle, and keep the lower end of the windows parralel with the gunwale line. The windows are about 3,5 cm above the level of the top of the beam mounts (I scribed this line on the hull with the laser level this weekend).
NOTE 20/4/08: the vertical line on the picture below is the position of the main bulkhead. When cutting out the windows I decided to put the windows about 3 cm further back than shown on this picture, as the front of the window was a bit too close to the beam mounts to my liking.I find it difficult to judge if the windows are in the right place. I'd like to stand back a little further, but that's not possible in my workshop.

When I'm satisfied with the place of the window-templates I'll drill some holes to mark their position and then first fair the cabin sides before cutting out the windows.

cabin floor + wingnet support tube

I've been doing a lot of small tasks lately (finishing taping etc.) with no visible progress. Yesterday however me and my brother Hans got some new items done....

In the centerboard version of the F22 putting in the forward cabin floor is mandatory. I preformed a flange on the 'front' of the floor....
...and used some cheap&light foam to form the other gluing flanges (same trick I used for the cockpit coaming). This week I'll put the floor in.
With the beam mount laminations complete we could continue to glue the wingnet support on the hull. I'm going for the 'tube' option - maybe a bit more difficult to fair, but much cleaner than mounting a support with a whole row of bolts through the hull.
We first tried to locate the position of the tube by guesstimating where the gunwale edge should have been (the edge is gone because I had to round it prior to laminating) but this didn't work very well. Luckily I recently bought a not too expensive laser level - this worked perfect.
Tube in place with some temporary screws and fixed with dots of glue. I'm fitting a tube for the optional bow net as well.
First pass with putty and almost ready for laminating.