Transoms, Tumbles, and Tons of Holes to Fill

I was feeling quite proud of myself in terms of how well the hull panels were fitting together without much hassle. Well, I guess pride goeth before transoms (or as another PMD builder put it, "those &%$^%# transoms!") I’ve developed a homeowners project motto that seems to apply here. A homeowner does a project or repair job once for practice and then does it over again to get things right. Well I tried stitching the transoms one evening and I just wasn’t happy with the result so I tried it a second time the next morning. The second time seemed to be the charm. I had very small gaps when I was finally done and the overhang of the hull panels past the transoms was a bare minimum.

That suggestion in the instructions for appling the fillet mixture works using a "pastry bag" made from a freezer bag works great!

The original version of the saying regarding pride reared its ugly head later. You know – pride goeth before a fall. It seems I needed to make a line on the floor of the boat to line up the rear bulkhead. My worksurfaces and sawhorses placed the boat at a comfortable height for most operations but even at 6’5” I couldn’t reach the bottom of the boat well enough to make my line. So, with the utmost confidence in my worksurface arrangement, which had worked so well up to this point, I got up onto the worksurface and made my line. However, as I shifted my weight to get back down off the worksurface I reached my destination, the floor of the garage, far more quickly than anticipated and with much more noise and debris than I intended. There were no major injuries to the boat or me and no lingering pains to remind me of the event but the worksurface design needs to be revisited.

In this next picture you see I have all of the stitching completed and I am making efforts to prevent something that happened to another builder that I still cringe about. You see this other builder ended up with a twist in his boat. After the boat was complete a picture taken from the same direction as this picture, but with the boat upright, clearly shows the front and rear transoms with different orientations for their lateral axes. In this picture I have used aluminum rails laying on the same supports as the front and rear of the boat and I have checked to make certain the rails (and therefore the transoms) are parallel to each other. While the application of epoxy to the seams will secure much of the shape of the boat I will repeat this alignment check when I secure the bulkheads and seats because they provide a significant portion of the structural alignment.

Since the previous picture I have partially filled the panel seams with silica-thickened epoxy and finished up with wood flour thickened epoxy. I have also filled all of the holes from the stitches. Up until now I have enjoyed each phase of this project, however, filling all those holes really tries my patience.

Fiberglassing the bottom panel is the next task.