August 12: Hot

It's been bloody hot lately. "What is hot," you ask? The heat index was up over 110 this week. In short, it's too damn hot to spend much time outside working on the boat. Work has been chewing up all my free time lately which is just as well. I'm good for maybe an hour or two in the evening when its down in the 90s. But even then, I'm pretty sure I'm not doing my finest thinking while my brain is slowly stewing in my skull. On the bright side, the slowdown has made me take stock of a few things that I wouldn't have otherwise.

For one thing, I decided to re-cut the forward bulkhead. It was not fitting too well as a result of the stiffer plywood I'm using for the hull bottom. I was able to fill the gap where the fit wasn't so good with an extra piece of plywood epoxied to the bulkhead. It worked fine, but didn't look so good. So after staring at that jury-rigged solution for a week or so, I decided I had better redo it or it would bug me forever. I cut out the original with its added pieces, and used that as a template for a new bulkhead which fit nicely with a bit of scribing and other tweaks. The whole thing took about an hour or so which is a good thing, cause ya know, it's really hot out there. It is now epoxy-tabbed in place awaiting fiberglass.

New bulkhead in place. Notice the absence of a large gap along the bottom edge. Much better.

The next big project is installing the keel batten. This is basically an interior keel strip intended to stiffen the hull for trailering and beaching and such. It has to be beveled along its length to match the angle of the hull bottom from the transom to the forward bulkhead. The angle is slight at the transom, but becomes much sharper toward the front. I took several measurements with a bevel gauge along the bottom of the hull and transferred these to the keel batten stock. This gave me a general idea how much material to remove to get a decent fit. Ten minutes with the power planer had the rough shaping done. This was followed by a cold beer. Did I mention how hot it is out there? I can't remember. Instead of trying to get a perfect fit, the idea is to get it close and bed it in a layer of thickened epoxy deep enough to fill any gaps. So that is ready to go.

There's only one problem. Mixing enough epoxy to fill for the project it difficult in this heat. Normally, the slow hardener that I use would give me ample time to get enough mixed and in place to set the batten. But at these temperatures, the mixture starts catalyzing so quickly it's hard to get enough prepared in one shot. So it looks like I'm going to have to put together some kind of ice bath to keep the mixture cool. I'm still mulling that one over.


Here are a few pics of where things stand right now. More soon (hopefully)