Continuing to shape the starboard float

So I’ve been rather busy this week with things and haven’t had a chance to upload pictures or write progress. I’m back-dating it to when it occurred and apologizing for the slow updates 🙂

Things would go a little quicker if there wasn’t a waiting time involved in bog drying when it comes to fairing. Can usually do a few hours at a time until there’s a spot that just has to get filled in (almost always because we didn’t plank exactly right or similar reasons) – after that the area needs to sit until dry enough to sand without clogging the paper or just crumbling instead of smoothing.

Did manage to put a few hours of work in this weekend, however. Started with wrapping the chainplate with a few layers of light cloth (after making sure I was happy with the deck radius and such) – will go back and drill out the hole at some point in the future – no real rush on that right now. Have much more important areas to tackle 🙂

Caught (hopefully) the last of the screw-holes and larger seams on the inside face of this float. Was able to do some fairing to it, but because of a slight cold-snap it just didn’t finish curing in time.

Glued the bow-cap piece on the float and held it in place with some tooth-picks. It actually slid down slightly, but not too much – only a very thin layer of bog on top required to get even with the deck again.

Found the easiest way for us to get the shape down was the orbital sander while looking straight down on the face currently shaping. Would then just hold the orbital at the angle the float side was taking and bring the bow cap down to match.

After a little bit with that and a pretty small amount of time spent with the the block sander, we came up with something that looks a little like this

Am quite happy with the results. 🙂 It will get a few layers of glass over it before the rest of the float gets the exterior glassed. Hopefully next time we’ll go ahead and glass the bow cap and then finish sanding the side faces while that cures.

Put the port float up on the ceiling again just to make room to finish working (easily) on the starboard float. Figured we’ll just take this one to completion (glassing and maybe final fairing), put it in storage, and bring down the port float to finish the deck and repeat the process.

Started rough fairing the outside of the float as well

All things considered – I think so far there are about 4-5 hours worth of sanding for us in this stage, and that’s mostly because of some scallops in the planking towards the bow where we weren’t as careful as should have been with batten placement and foam placement.

At this pace, I’m thinking another weekend or two and this float will be ready for external glassing.

Time spent: 5 hours