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I did what Bill said.
It's virtually impossible to find a piece of lumber that long that's going to be straight and true. If you laminate them and orient the layers so that any bow or curve is working against each other, you end up with some pretty straight and solid pieces in the end.

Before the boat I'm building now, I had a 14' seadoo jetboat. Was painful to ride in heavy chop, and yes, it did cavitate quite a bit. I don't know how rough things get in the Mediterranean, but a small boat in rough chop makes for a not so enjoyable day on the water. Regarding the change in the bea...

I'm a little late to the discussion, but I've used the plastic bag trick, the empty caulk tubes, and the six-10 tubes from west. IMO, the plastic bag idea turned out to be a lot messier and more awkward than I anticipated. I definitely prefer the caulk gun approach. While the six-10 stuff is great, ...

Very cool.
I'm also glad you decided to continue with the reconstruction instead of scrapping and starting new.
Keep Dad's legacy alive. This one will definitely have more soul when you finish her.

Roberta always has the best ideas... you'd think she's done this boat building stuff before.

Regarding the keel issue. What about routing or chiseling the notch in the transom a little deeper to make it flush with the knee. Then just make a slightly thicker keel. It should all work itself out during the fairing process.

If I understand you correctly, you're talking about the build frame, not any of the boat frames, right? If so, I would say make it as high as possible. As long as you can still reach the keel, it will be fine. Higher is easier to work with (for me anyway), plus it's easier to get underneath to clean...

I actually started with 60 grit.
Epoxy is hard, it doesn't sand down easily.

Bill Edmundson wrote:Matter of fact that is what I'm doing now.Bill

...and you're loving it!!!

Boy that's an impressive, yet intimidating picture.
One heck of an engine room!

Honestly, I think I would be overwhelmed by it all.

Start sanding it. If you can sand it smooth without getting down to the weave, then you're good. If you start hitting the weave, then you'll need another coat.

Steve S wrote:I’m not working on it much lately because we are working on building a new house...

With a bigger family room for a bigger boat, I'm sure.

I guess it's a little late for this method, now that you've already glassed. But I glassed the transom first, then built up the roundover with some thickened epoxy, filed it flush, then glassed over the bottom. taransom glass.png I suppose another option now would be to build it up with several stri...

For the screws I went with bronze, but for all the bolts I also went the galvanized route.
In addition to them being galvanized, they're also covered with some epoxy and several coats of bilge paint.
My boat will only see freshwater as well.
I'm not worried.

Very cool. I haven't seen one of these builds before.
And only 2 months into it?? You certainly are making quick work of things!