Whew.  What a good “vacation” from work the past few days.  Have managed to get some work done and things should start getting even more interesting soon!

First, a picture of the stack of flat panels for the main hull.  Only  a few left to make that aren’t needed any time soon.

Even though it’s not as cold down here as it is for you Northerners – the drop in temperature has made the garage cold and epoxy thick.  Our little heater wasn’t doing much of anything, so we decided to try out this 1500W Halogen heater…  Works VERY nice for the money.

The first thing we did was completely empty the garage working space and do massive cleaning, sweeping and vacuuming.  There was so much fairing compound and fiberglass dust under the strongback!

We were soon left with a nice clean and empty (not for long!) garage

We had been debating leaving the strongback at the height shown above since it worked so well for the floats.  As soon as frame 5 went up we debated even more.  We went ahead and braced it up plumb and proper and sat back to think.  Decided to think it over some dinner and finally came to the conclusion that we would be better off just to spend the short amount of time now to lower the strongback and re-level/true it up now instead of fighting with the lack of ceiling space later.  I have no pictures of this, but we got everything taken care of in under an hour; happens so much quicker the second time around.

Here’s a picture of the now-lowered strongback with Frame 5 braced in place.  I’m tracing the last 5 frames that I cut out first thing in the morning.

Well, it ended up being after noon because of noise policies in the neighborhood and I didn’t want to upset anyone with the loud jig-saw and vacuum.  Once cut out, I started placing frames.  Had frames 6 and 7 finished by the time dad got home from work and we put the remaining frames in place before 7pm that evening – just in time for a lunch break.

We probably could have worked even quicker, but needed to make some extra braces for the forward frames (legs since they didn’t span the full width of the strongback the way I cut them, and bracing since we trimmed down the sides of 3 and 4 so the scaffold would fit).

The night before we went to a friend’s house (Thanks Fred!) and ripped 2 4x8x3/4″ sheets of plywood (some pretty good Birch with very few voids) into ³⁄₄″ wide strips to use as battens.  We are hoping these will work better than the pine we used for the floats.

Hope all you other builders had a productive holiday (either with the boat or the family)

Happy New Year!

Time spent: 18 hours