Fun with seats

February 20.  Happy National Cherry Pie Day.

The big sand is almost around the corner.

A couple of days ago after reading the manual three times before what i had to do sunk in i installed the cleats which hold the wooden hip braces to the underside of the deck.  That turned out to be easier than i expected.  I even managed to keep from gluing the hip braces to the cleats!  Yay.  Not insignificant, since i had to put a couple of blind fillets on the back of each cleat to fasten each to the deck, and i was concerned that the epoxy might drip down and touch the braces, fastening them forever.  Which would be bad.

As it happened, there was just one small drip holding one brace to its cleat, which i was able to get through with a chisel and a teeny bit of oompf.

Last night i finished off filleting and glassing the cleats and glassed the back of the hip braces onto the bottom of the seat with two layers of cloth.  Messy, only because i lacked a suitable perch to place the seat on so as to prevent the cloth from touching the bench and being pulled away from the top of the braces.  Solution: clamp that sucka.

Next steps:  Feather off the edges of the glass tape i used to hold the braces in place prior to glassing the whole enchilada, then 2 layers of glass cloth over the inside  of the braces into the top of the seat. Then installing all of the seat hardware and bolting the seat into place.  A couple more sessions to bury all of the cloth on the hull, and the big sand is nigh.  Yum.

The end is coming into view

Since the last post:

The deck has gotten three coats of epoxy and is almost done.  And very, very pretty.

I trimmed the bottom coamings and feathered the knee braces down to about a quarter of an inch.  With the taper cutting through three or four laminations of the plywood it's really distinctive. That part of the coating has gotten a couple of coats of epoxy as well.

The hatches have been glassed and thoroughly covered in epoxy and are basically done.

I had been worried about smoothing out some of the glass at the stern especially since I was beginning to cut into glass rather than removing resin(BAD).
  I changed my approach last night by tying the boat so that the stern was horizontal or nearly so and brushed a coat of epoxy over the area I was worried about to fill the low spots rather than remove the highs. Seems to be working even if it takes another couple of coats to kill it.

There is a bunch of sanding in my future to get the boat as smooth as possible before the last coat of resin and the varnish.  Maybe more than a bunch. I'll have to check.

A bunch of little stuff.

A frustrating but illuminating lesson last night, Feb 3rd.

I got in and looked at the test batch of epoxy I mixed last to me and it had cured perfect. I also looked at the containers for all the epoxy I used the other night and it had cured too, hard as a rock. So all my rework was going to be a waste of time. But it also taught me that this stuff is way more fault tolerant  than the kit instructions would have had me believe.

Anyway this turned out to be the night to tape the fillets on the underside of each hatch, fill the seams on the tops, glass the front and part of the back of the seat back,install the seat mounting tabs with fillets and glass, and the forward rib. Got it to work after three tries by using a wood block about 6 inches long to soften the curve that the rib had to make.  Now all those ribs need is glass and they're done.

Tomorrow the hatches get glassed and a bit of sanding on the deck and then it's finally time for the deck to get glassed. Looking forward.