I also love having MLK day off of work. I have been able to accomplish a fair bit due to the long weekend. I have officially completed chapter 2 of Pocketship! The lower hull is complete and work has begun on the upper hull. This is where the real excitement begins!
I was out in the driveway working away this afternoon taking advantage of the relatively warm weather. Hey, 40 degrees in January is practically shorts weather in New England! And I of course had the stereo cranked up pretty loud in the garage when my neighbor comes over and says the bass line to my trance music is "penetrating" A good adjective to use for that type of music I must say.... But I digress, I was polite and said I would turn it down, but he happened to see the boat in the garage and his immediate reaction was "Motherf*@ker! That's damn impressive! You've done all that from scratch!" I must say I enjoy people's reactions when they see the boat for the first time. It clearly is a source of great pride for me.
On to construction details though... I anchored down the seats the other day and peppered the deck with screws to hold it in place while the epoxy cured... I'm using the fast hardener in the colder weather, and I like to heat the epoxy up on my garage heater so the reaction moves extra fast. This has the downside of requiring me to work at lightning speed once the resin and hardener are mixed before the cup melts in my hand and I'm stuck with a rock hard gob of epoxy. (It's happened before, even in cold weather) But today I began by pulling up the screws and filling the holes with more epoxy so the deck will be nice and smooth after a final sanding tomorrow. See:
I also trimmed the footwell down so the edges are nice and smooth and used the 1/2" router bit to put a nice round edge on it. Looks pretty good if I may say.... although I have noticed the footwell isn't really very deep. For a tall person like me this will probably be a pain after awhile...
Lastly, the rudder is almost complete now as well. It is very tightly clamped together at the moment while the epoxy cures (the base of the rudder is hollow believe it or not, I am assuming it's designed this way to save weight) I need to add the rudder wing and the cheeks tomorrow, I am looking forward to using the router to smooth out the edges of the cheeks to give the rudder that professional look. A picture of that will come later this week.
On the slate for tomorrow is to start stitching the seatback frames into place and possibly even the rear cabin wall!
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