Cleaning up inside of floats and making first float deck

Spent the weekend cleaning up the inside of the floats and making the first float deck (wanted to do both at the same time, but just didn’t have the space and such to do it cleanly.

Once again, the floats get moved into the driveway for working after making some cradles to support them upright at the beam bulkheads

Nothing else exciting for pictures here as I was quite covered in fiberglass “snow” falling from the sky after attacking things with the angle grinder for a while to clean up edges, openings and get the flange roughed up for gluing the deck in the near future.  Also made a little jig to hold the bow compression strut in place to dry.

Next I bogged together a bunch of the larger scraps to make the first float deck and after much sanding, drew the outline on it.  I goofed the first center-line, but caught it and corrected accordingly.  The high-density CoreCell has also been bogged in place prior to the sanding.

A rare occasion, while changing gloves and needing to mix another batch of resin I remembered to snap an in-progress shot

After the resin started to gel, I trimmed the fabric with a razor blade and peeled up the masking tape I had lined out just inside the outline to keep that portion clean for fairing.  You can also make out the stringers and the fiberglass backing plates for the pad-eyes.  I made these from a bunch of scrap fabric and different orientations and put a weight on them (with plastic and peelply) until they dried.

The next morning I trimmed the float deck

Put it on the float and marked where I needed to trim the flange

All trimmed and fitting like a charm

This is the starboard float and will be the first one that is “dried in”.  We started shaping the keel as well, but didn’t have enough time to finish.  Not going to put the top on until the keel is faired in case we go down to the laminate and extra layers are required inside for reenforcement.  I’m *hoping* next weekend we’ll have the keel shaped and glue the float deck on.  The bow-caps are also glued together with contact cement and ready to be put in place and sanded to shape.  We made these by cutting the foam into the full size shape of the bow template and then gluing offcuts to the sides of them.  Will take pictures of it before it’s glued on.

Time spent: roughly 12 hours