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All along, my plan has been to finish the boat near Lake Superior and start our sailing adventures on the waters where I grew up. I’ve had the hulls inside my uncle’s shop for a few years while I got them this far, and while it’s been a great situation, the very short building season along with the four hour drive while maintaining a full time job and a family has been taxing.

My solution? Head south (well at least a little farther south)

From fall 2011 – hull move

to a marina on the Mississippi about four miles from my house. It may not seem much farther south, but the spring comes  earlier and the winter starts later just a couple hundred miles south. So with the amazing skills of uncle John, we packed up the hulls:

From fall 2011 – hull move

From fall 2011 – hull move

From fall 2011 – hull move

And I hit the road

From fall 2011 – hull move

Both hulls are now snug and secure 100 yards from the Mississippi river.

From fall 2011 – hull move

The big question has to be: a sail boat on the Mississippi?!? Well, yes, it is odd, but it’s for the purposes of finishing the build. I figure if huge barges can make it up from the gulf, I can find a way to take a river trip to get the boat to bigger water. Either to the Great lakes via the Mississippi/Illinois River, or directly to the Gulf will work. I’m really more focused on finishing the building right now to think much about it. I know it has been done plenty of times before by sailboats with masts on the deck to avoid low bridges, so I’ll be able to figure it out when the time comes. In fact, there’s a 40′ Jim Brown trimaran a couple spaces down from me. I believe it came in by the river from Lake Superior.

I think the pictures say it all…

From fall 2011 – paint

From fall 2011 – paint

From fall 2011 – paint

From fall 2011 – paint

From fall 2011 – paint

From fall 2011 – paint

From fall 2011 – paint

I’ve been putting in some very long days on the hulls lately, and it’s nice to be at a stage where I get to see frequent progress. So often, I’ll get stuck in projects that take seem to take forever without much satisfying visual progress…and then there are weekends where I get inside upright hulls for the first time and everything seems to have changed. It really gives me a boost of energy, and while working on them upright has added some challenges with many more trips up and down the ladder, it’s fun to see the space from a different perspective. I’ve just started doing some work on the inside, so the bulkhead cutouts are just rough cut which is why they look a little funky.

From summer 2011

It used to be so easy to clean out the inside of the hulls when they were upside down. I have to be a little more creative now:

From summer 2011

Woo-hoo! One hull is upright!!

From summer 2011

From summer 2011

It seems this is going to go down as the boat building year where I put in a ton of hours, but things don’t look that different from where it was last season. I do have a lot of things checked off the list, but when I went looking for pictures of it all, it’s not that different.

I’ll just go with a list of a few things I’ve done this season:

-prepped and coated the bottoms with a copper epoxy mix. There’s a lot of debate about the usefulness of such a coating, so it’s likely I’ll regret that decision, but I can still overcoat it with something later. I’m not afraid to frequently go over the side and clean the bottom if it doesn’t work well.

-prepped the topsides for paint. All I need to do now is tape off the water line and paint. That will be a good day.

-built the transom steps from foam and glass. In the picture, the outsides are not glassed yet. I’ll do that when I turn them over.

From summer 2011

-built and installed the rudder tube/bearing assembly. Here’s uncle John turning my rudder bearings on his lathe. They fit perfectly into the G10 tubes which in turn are heavily glassed to the transom. One day in the not too near future, the rudder stock will shoot out of here and steer the boat.

From summer 2011

From summer 2011

From summer 2011

-I Started to turn the hulls over. When I got them half way over and the bracing removed, I realized how much easier it would be to build out some of the interior while they were still suspended from the ceiling, so I left them hanging there and I’ve been cleaning up the insides and cutting the bunks to fit. Also note the way the shop looks like a complete disaster area. I did clean it up right after this shot.

From summer 2011

It won’t be long and the hulls will be fully upright!

Stay tuned for an update on the cuddy interior. Wires, Batteries, Inverters, and Sinks, oh my!

The method for putting my hulls together leaves a flat area at the bow (very front). It’s to be filled with foam, rounded off, and glassed over. It creates somewhat of a sacrifical area, so if you hit something really hard, I suppose the false bow will get taken off first hopefully leaving the hull structurally sound. I’ll do my best to avoid testing it.

Attaching the foam to the already glassed over stem was a chore. I didn’t want to simply drive screws through the stem and what I came up with fell apart no less than four times before I finally got it to hold.

From Fall 2010

Once the first layer was in, it was easier to clamp and screw to that:

From Fall 2010

After that, rounding it off is simply a matter of applying muscle to the long board, which you can see still leaning against the hull.

From Fall 2010

From Fall 2010

and finally, lots of fiberglass:

From Fall 2010

With that, the hull is totally fiberglassed and everything I do to the outsides is just cleaning up my glass work to get ready for paint. For some builders, this takes as much or more time than any other step, but I’m not looking to build something that appears to have popped out of a mold with a perfect mirror reflection. I’ll be doing more that just “slapping” a coat of paint on, but it’s all just aesthetic at this point and I really want to go sailing soon. The designer said it best when he suggests building a 50ft boat: One that looks just as good as anything from 50 feet away.

Once I had my strategy for building the keels figured out, they were pretty easy to knock out. I had the dimensions to the inside of the 12mm skin on 2 horizontal points. I just made a temporary frame out of those dimensions:

From Summer 2010

cut 12mm core-cell to shape:

From Summer 2010

glassed the inside of the panels first, offered them up to the frames, and glassed the outside.

From Summer 2010

Obviously, I still had to do quite a bit of glassing on the inside after I pulled the keel from the frame, but it helped a lot that I did the majority of it before I put it all together.

From Summer 2010

A picture of my high tech resin applicator extension may help to explain the fun I had that night…until 2 am.

From Summer 2010

Most of the cuddy work in the previous two posts was done in the spring to mid summer. The hulls have been my latest obsession. Last year, I was thinking I would bring them down to the yard and work on them closer to home. After my experience working on the cuddy outside, I didn’t want to put them out doors without decks. It didn’t help that we had a very rainy spring and early summer. Driving north to work on them in the shop was the way to go. I have gotten pretty far on them lately. All the bulkheads are fully glassed in, the temporary forms are gone and the outsides are faired and glassed. I’m still working on the keel line and the false stems, but I hope to be done with that part soon.

view of the aft part of the hull forward. Some day, this is where the rudders will be mounted. And steps to climb up into the boat from the water or a dingy.

From Summer 2010

You can see a little of the both hulls. The second one is way off in the background.

From Summer 2010

A roll of my good friend, peel ply, will save me countless hours of sanding and filling the outside surface of the fiberglass.

From Summer 2010

I pulled the hull off the forms by myself and thought it would be fun to stitch a short video together of the move. I put a camera on a tripod and after each incremental move, I’d hit the shutter button.

stay tuned for core-cell mini keels.

We just spent 2 weeks working on the second hull and I’m feeling good about the progress. The center line and inner stem all are all glassed and the bulkheads are nearly ready to be glassed in. Working on this hull has been a lot like rebuilding a puzzle that you’ve already completed. You already know where every thing goes and how it fits together. It’s just a matter of executing it properly. Being that it didn’t look any different than the other hull and the fact that I was putting in a lot of hours this trip, I never got around to any new pictures, but we’re going to go up again for a short trip and I’ll probably get some then. Since I have a hard time posting without pictures, I’ll include this one of me taken just before I returned to my non-boat building job…I like to call it the boat paying for job. You may wonder what it has to do with boat building, and the obvious feature is that I temporarily have much more facial hair (no time for shaving while at the shop), but if you look closely, you’ll see what this project is doing to me. The gray hairs have made their way from my scalp to my face. I knew going in that this was going to take years to complete and I’m still prepared for the huge amount of work ahead of me, but I’m pretty sure these short intense trips up north are removing years from my life. I guess I better get some more wheat grass growing, so I can bank a few more years up to even the score. I’ll make up the rest when I’m sitting on board under the stars instead of under an airport.

For the first part of the trip, I glassed the bulkheads in and did some work on the side of the starboard hull that was easily accessible. Moving the hull off the forms was the most stressful event of this project so far. I knew it was going to be difficult to get it clear of the forms, but with 9 lifters and a couple tries we did it. I think the boat survived far better than my nerves did.

From summer 09

From summer 09

From summer 09

From summer 09

From summer 09

From summer 09

The rest of the trip to work on the hulls was mostly uneventful. I’ve got the second half of the port hull foamed, sanded and ready for fiberglass.

From summer 09