shakedown

Finally sailing, June 14, 2010.  She performed beautifully, with a light weather helm, responsive and able to point very high.  More later.

Epoxy and Butt Joints

First I want to thank Dave Masland for his excellent blog describing his Nutmeg build in 2006. You'll notice in his Epoxy and Butt Joints post he used what appear to be black plastic trash bags for polyfilm to sandwich the layup.

We took a chance and tried it. Those trash bags totally work, but we didn't have the room to glue up the sides next to each other as did Dave. We had to stack them, as described in the instructions included with the plans.

I was a bit too frugal with how much plastic I used on the layer between the sides, and the epoxy squeezed out past the polyfilm membrane and stuck them together a bit.

If you have to stack the sides to glue them up, I recommend using at least a 12" wide strip between them.

Also, I am going to cut my fiberglass a bit wider, probably 2 3/8" for the bottom butt joint. It can slip around a bit during positioning the plywood, and I want to be sure to have at least 1 1/8" laminated either side of the joint.

But it so worked!

Materials and Small Miracles

I found four sheets of 1/4" AC ply and the 1 1/2" stock for the transom frame in the overhead of our garage. The 1x3 for the frames I ripped from 1x4 left over from a job last year. One very nice tight grained tamarack 2x4, also a leftover, has become the stem.

I am totally satisfied with the 1 1/2 qt epoxy kit (green) I ordered from John Greer & Associates.