Centerboard and Rudder

These are the blades that cut through the water to limit side slip and to steer the boat. I will give them a foil shape blunt on the forward edge and with a gradual taper on the aft edge.

These are the plywood blanks that come with the kit. I have glued them up two layers for the rudder and three layers for the daggerboard. I have penciled in a line that I will bring the initial taper to.

The internal layers of plywood produce a pattern that helps keep the shaping even.

I soaked a piece of braided line in epoxy and set it into the leading edge of the boards. This helps to prevent damage to the blade when objects are encountered.

I covered both the rudder and daggerboard with a layer of glass cloth saturated with epoxy. This significantly increases their strength and resistance to moisture.

While working on the daggerboard I also started working on the daggerboard case.

With the daggerboard finished I can adjust the kingposts so the case has about 1/8 inch clearance.

Winding and Taping

 The sticks laid across the gunwales one up forward and the other aft are called winding sticks. They are carefully placed perpendicular to the center line of the boat. If you squat down and sight along the sticks you can detect even a small twist in the boat. Then by adjusting your boat stand you can get the boat to lay straight. While the boat is just held together with wires it is easy to correct any twist, but once you start adding the seats, bulkheads, and start taping the seams the boat will be locked into its shape.

This is a close up inside the boat near the rear. You can see the copper wires that hold the panels together. I have made epoxy welds between the wires so I can remove them before filleting and taping the seams.

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 Here you get a good view of the temporary bulkhead in the center of the boat. I have installed the seat sides and the aft bulkhead. Graham advised that when building a kit it is important to test fit ahead of time as many pieces as possible. If you are building from scratch you can always custom cut a piece to fit, but the kit parts have little tolerance for error.

 Here you can see how tabs in the seat sides fit into notches in the forward bulkhead.

 Sometimes a drywall screw is the best way to hold a piece in place until the epoxy sets. Screws don't allow the pieces to slip and they can be used where a clamp could not reach. Here are a couple of screws from the bottom up into the transom. Drywall screws are cheap and not very strong. I like to loosen them a little before the epoxy has set. If you don't there is risk that the screw head will break off. Buried under an epoxy coating the steel screw might not cause a problem for quite awhile but I dig them out rather than leave any pieces behind. If you don't loosen the screws before the epoxy has set a soldiering iron will heat the screw enough to make the epoxy let go.,

 The white stripes are fiberglass tape laid out and cut to length.The tape is wound up out of the way and a fillet is laid down in the seam. When the fillet is partly set I apply the tape and wet it out with unthickened epoxy.