Cheek to Cheek

Today will be mostly pictures as I'm tired. Why? Here's my oven clock:

As in, the morning. That's what happens when you decide to "sand a little bit" at 12:30am. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A couple days ago, I glued up the two rudder cheeks on one side of the rudder and set up the clamps. The next day, I glued up the other side. A 1/4" strip of scrap sat the rudder up so it would cure evenly. That's pretty much how it sat until tonight. With a relatively busy weekend, this was the first time I was able to get back into the shop. One of the events was the spring gathering of the Minnesota Sailing Alliance, a loose knit group of sailors, skippers, and captains who meet about once a week and sail. It was nice to see some folks I hadn't seen since the sailing season ended so very long ago.

At the event, while I was deep into my tall mug of Summit, one guy came rushing over to shake my hand and ask if I was the "boat builder". I said, sure, I'm building a boat. Turns out he says he's got a 30' sailboat 3/4 done in Michigan - a 3-masted schooner that he plans to show to corporations who then will give him $7 million to build a 140' tall ship. When I suggested that a 140' sailboat will require masts maybe, I don't know, 100' tall, he just shrugged and asked if I'd help him build it. I don't doubt people's skills, but I'm fairly skeptical by nature. That said, I didn't crush his dream - who am I to do that? - so I just said when he got the contract, give me a call. I'll be waiting! I should add that the 30' boat he's working on is "from pictures he took of another boat".

Cheeks clamped.

Back to reality -- sanding soon morphed into chamfering. I did the 45' chamfer on the rudder cheeks after the glue up cured. The manual makes this look easy. Zip, done! Not exactly. Most chamfering bits have a bearing on the bottom so that it can run along an even surface and carve out the pattern. No real issues there (though even the slightest wave in the cuts will cause waves in the chamfering pattern.)

Added 45' chamfer to the cheeks. Mostly came out OK. This view of the tiller slot made me go back and sand it some more.

The problem arises where the rudder cheek meets the main part of the rudder. The bearing in this area cannot simply glide but in fact will gouge a trench exactly where you don't want it to. I adjusted the router to cut a little higher, just off the surface of the main rudder body so that the bearing rode against the cheek, and then hand sanded to match the profile of the rest of the cheeks. This took awhile to get right, especially as I plan to keep the rudder cheeks bright and couldn't really see an easy way to do this without risking damage to a highly visible and important part of the boat. I'm wondering if other people had this issue, as I don't remember anything complicated in any blog on this topic? It could be because it would've been much easier to do the chamfering before the glue up. Simply choose the 2 top cheeks on either side, chamfer, and done.

Re-application of epoxy to fill voids and tear out. This, to date, is the saddest moment of the build so far.

The sanding and chamfering, too, exposed some voids in the glue up and areas where I had some tear out. That meant mixing up a little thickened epoxy for some fairing. That was more painful to do than I expected - actually putting epoxy back onto a clean area that I spent the better part of an hour sanding. If there was any good news on that, I was able to collect a little more epoxy for the rabbet trench in the centerboard. This little trench - about 3/8" wide and 1/4" inch - runs halfway around the centerboard. By volume, it's roughly between Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico. It takes a LOT of epoxy to fill as I've been at it for about week, moving extra epoxy into this canyon in a never-ending effort to fill the void. I'm sure there's a keen metaphor there; I'm already having bad dreams about dumping epoxy into a bottomless well.

The rabbet trench gets thickened epoxy. The trench has much more volume than expected. It gobbles up epoxy like crazy.

While I had some epoxy to play with, I put a layer of epoxy down on the rudder wing/step. I didn't see this called out in the manual. I guess that's because it will get the full fiberglass treatment. But I don't see anything wrong with putting a layer down for a little strength as this will be a highly stressed component.

The rudder step gets a coat of epoxy.

It was also a good opportunity to check the tapers in the blocking. They came out nice - the rudder has an obvious taper and should work as expected in the water with minimal drag. The extra work to get this right was worth it. I was happy to see no voids and clean lines.

Rudder bottom with taper from leading to trailing edge (right to left).

Taper along the top. Trailing edge here, just below where the back of the tiller exits the tiller slot.

Meanwhile, the keel sits in the living room waiting for a nice day for a lead pour. Given it's snowing as I type this, that might not be for awhile, though a FB friend recently announced it'll be 74 degrees next week. I didn't realize she was a part-time meteorologist but I'm hopeful. She's at least a bit smarter than that damn groundhog.

The keel assembly sits waiting for a nice day. Fiberglass box, too.