So I had a very slow summer on the boat this year as work has been *incredibly* busy, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down soon. At this rate, it will take 10 years to finish the boat!
On the bright side, now that it's flipped over, things look like they're going much faster
I've so far gotten to the point that the "important" decking pieces have been roughly fitted, and most of the deck framing has been installed - I'll need two more side panels to be fitted in, as well as the coaming, dash beam, and accompanying deck beam before the top doesn't need any more wood work. The plans recommend fitting the planking to the carling before installing the coaming (which is a fantastic idea) so they'll be fitted completely now, then taken off and left to wait as I encapsulate the framing and interior with epoxy, and install the hardware. The panels will also be encapsulated before their final installation. Some pictures of the current fitting process (just rough cut):
I really love the rear deck curve, both the transom profile and the cockpit from above
Toying with the idea of curving the front corners of the cockpit slightly as well, as you can see from the very wide roughcuts. I think I'm going to do it as it matches the rear better.
Overhead look. I still haven't decided if I'm going to pop the dash up from the side deck with the coaming, like the rampage normally has. I suspect in the end I will to get the increased cockpit and coaming height.
As you can see the plans allow the builder to chose between a "straight" ended rear cockpit, or a curved cockpit boundary shown here. One of the big reasons I like the design is how the aft cockpit circles around the engine, framing it as the center piece
. However, I deviated quite heavily from the instructions on how to do so. Normally, the rear panels are supposed to be built up with scrap along the inner edge, and the carling in that area omitted entirely. This seemed like a poor idea to me so I instead opted to install the curved carlings you see. I can now understand why they are not spec'd in the plans as the thought process involved was a huge undertaking to get them to be fair both from above and in profile to match the transom- they curve in both directions by the boats design, so I built them up from three 1/4 lamination to try and soften the curves. A minor issue I now have is that they ended up somewhat torqued due to the double curve, so I may have to add a 4th lamination to be able to create a level landing area for the coaming. Note that these pictures are from earlier in the build than above!
The curved carlings run from the aft deck beam in a curve to meet the straight carlings. The fairing that resulted was tricky, as I had to make sure the curve was as unidirectional as possible to avoid the plywood buckling (in which case cold molding techniques would have been needed). I managed to do a pretty good job but it was still VERY difficult to bend the plywood into place for rough fitting.
The curved carlings were done in three steps, all very quickly. After all of the calculations had been done, the first member was fit using clamps, with the same segment of particularly straight 1/4" x 2" wood being split in two and butted at the midline on the deck beam. They were then forced into a roughly perfect curve by calculating the length required to make a semi circle, and where they would have to be anchored on the carlings for this to work. Once this was done, two more laminations were cut at 4 and 8 inches longer, and they were then installed in reverse order (longest first). This allowed there to be a natural taper towards the curve at the start point on the carling, where otherwise the 3/4" end would butt up against nothing. Raptor fasteners and clamps were used to epoxy everything into place, and it ended up working very well!
Even installing the carlings was quite tough - I ended up introducing an intentional 2 degree bend where they were butt-joined to compensate for the curves of the boat. As you can see, there was still a lot of fairing to be done!
I'm missing quite a few "segments" of pictures - the boat with the sheer line cleaned up just after flipping, the carling installation, the strongback / deck batten installations, and the faired top side. I have some of them but on a different camera so I'm just uploading the overall progress for now - I'm hoping to have all of the top (including dash beam, coamings, all plywood) fitted in (but not glued) by the end of the season, which will hopefully go as late as November (though maybe not).
I'm then hoping to get the hardware installed (other than engine) and the mahagony decking nailed down (with raptor fastenings, of course
) by the end of the following season, and finally in 2017 finish the decking, install the engine, deck harware, and seats... and hopefully launch. Fingers crossed!Cheers,
Denon
P.S. If anyone has any suggestions on light boat building woods I could use for the coaming, that would be great. I mean light in colour - I'd like something like white ash but without such a striking grain pattern. I'm going to have to build it up in multiple veneers like I did with the carling, if that makes any difference.
