Stops and Starts

Nose block pattern with 8' pine.

I had the nose block pattern with me while rummaging through the garage looking for the aft part of the keel when I looked up and saw two of the remaining planks of pine looming over my head. I used the first one to laminate the nose block itself, which was curing as I was moving on to the keel blocking. From plank to nose block in two days; that's pretty cool. I suppose I'll have many of those epiphanies over the next couple years, but it just reinforces the feeling that I don't think there's much better than sailing a boat built largely by your own hands

Unfortunately, at this rate, I'll be sailing in 2017, because it doesn't feel like I've gotten very far. I've been warned not to compare the rate of my build against other people's, but it's hard not to compare. By now, 2 weeks after receiving their kits, some builders got their hulls together (not counting the German fisherman who basically lied his way to page 200 in a day).

But it's still progress nonetheless. Chris lent me his plans so I was able to finally make the keel blocking to spec, at least the lamination part. I'll cut it to the pattern on the band saw tomorrow night. One thing that confused me a bit was where the vertical plank goes. It's about 8 inches long and sits roughly in the middle of the longer pattern part. but it's not clear exactly where it goes. Turns out it forms the butt joint for the aft and bow parts of the keel, about 1 inch on either side. With that puzzle settled, I glued up the centerboard itself, putting a few weights on top to ensure a good fit.

How many laminations do you see?

I'll add some commentary here about what can possibly go wrong with the keel build. PocketShip blog addicts may have noticed that a common problem is that the keel is often built crooked. There are two possible causes. The first is the keel is tapered so that if it cures without support, it will sag. The second is that the pattern has a LOT of play in it. It's supposed to start dead center and end dead center. Not carefully marking these centerpoints on the pattern when transferring it to the blank can easily put things out of whack, e.g. crooked. So between ensuring that the keel sits flush while curing and properly transferring the pattern (there's a novel idea!) there's quite a bit to look out for when putting this together.

I did make a mistake on the centerboard trunk, however, over the weekend. I laid down a strip of frog tape (as seen in an earlier post) but forgot to peel it off before the epoxy cured. That meant the frog tape + epoxy is now a permanent part of the boat. I tried really hard to scrape, cut, and sand it out and tried to dissolve a little with acetone, but eventually gave up as I started getting into the fiberglass itself. The one thing I didn't try was heat, but I didn't want to weaken these important joints. If I cut my own patterns, I would've cut them again. Alas, I'm resigned to sailing with frog tape in there. I'm hoping the frog tape doesn't destablize the joint. Liberal amounts of thickened epoxy applied like a fillet covered it up nicely. It should stay clear of the centerboard but I'm not happy it happened. I'll do a test of the centerboard once it's all built to make sure the board can move up and down easily.

Fillets over frogtape.

On the other hand, that's a pretty sweet fillet right there. Tomorrow I'll finish the "box" and be done with three pages of the manual. Then I'll try not to mess up my nose block blank which puts me on track to do a lead pour as soon as I can get some lead. Progress feels good!  (four laminations in the photo, btw -- long keel blocking, vertical keel blocking, nose blank, and centerboard)