Hulls
March thru November 2002

It was time to start building the frames. I traced the full scale plots that Gary Lidgard supplied me with onto 1/2" particleboard sheets using rolls of carbon paper. After the shape was transferred I took a jigsaw and carefully cut out the 25 frames one every 20 inches. I think that I am within about 1/8" of the drawing and looking along the frames standing up it looks pretty good.

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The foam that I am using is Core-Cell, a structural foam made by ATC chemicals in Canada. I am getting it through Noah's marine on the East Coast. The foam for the hulls is 3/4" thick and 4' by 8' size. The foam is a little bendable similar to 5/8" plywood.

Building the hulls is done upside down so the waterline is at eye height. The curves in the hull from the waterline up are not very tight so I am using whole sheets of foam to reduce the fairing later, from the waterline down the curves are getting tighter and the foam can not be applied in whole sheets anymore and I have ripped the sheets into 3" wide planks on the table saw. To help with lining up the individual planks I shaped the planks so that they interlock.

Full sheets above the waterline and 3" wide planks below


This is my "high tech industrial"shaper table and this is what the planks look like

The foam is almost all attached and the fairing starts

After all the foam was attached to the frames I sanded the hull smooth and faired it to roughly within 1/8" of fair I used a polyester fairing compound supplied by the foam manufacturer. This process took about a week. Two days to try come up with a functional long board and 5 days of sanding after I found that there is no substitute for long boarding by hand, no matter how much of a pain this is.

It is time to get everything ready to start glassing the first hull.

The table to cut the fiberglass, the yellow stuff is kevlar.

Starting to dry fit the dual bias cloth on the hull

I had help from Tom Collins standing next to the "cloth cutting table"

This is not the actual location for the port hull but it gives me a little more space around it

Preparing another stack of foam planks

Duncan Cowan is helping me with the fairing of the port hull

A better view of the fairing featuring Duncan Even though it is October it is about 90 degrees under the plastic cover so I bought a HUGE 3' diameter fan and that makes a major difference since it both cools us off and also blows all the extra dust out of the shed.

Glassing the inside of the hull is a lot more work than the outside. I ended up standing on the cloth and the resin and everything wanted to stick to me and to itself and to anything else it could stick to. So I have to do the layup one layer of glass at a time and only one side of the hull at a time. I am happy to have switched to a vinylester resin because it wets out the cloth easier and it doesn't get me looking like a strawberry as the epoxy did.

Port hull turned right side up

The inside of the hill is pretty rough from all the hardened bog ouzing out of the joints

After the hull is faired smooth I attached the first layer of glass to the bottom.

Next I hung the first layer of glass over the sides and after the glass was in the right place I mixed up the resin and "wetted it out".

Well it was finally time to turn the starboard hull right-side-up, I took all the screws out that connected the frames to the base, re-enforced the area's where the straps spanned the hull and jacked the boat up.
I had made the cradle that is on top of the hull to the same shape as the hull and I secured it with these yellow cargo straps so that the cradle would be in the right place after turning it over.

I had tied some low stretch line around the hull in two places and this line was lead through blocks that were hanging from the rafters.


After the boat was hanging in mid air from these blocks it was pretty easy to control the turning.


I hope that this is the last time that I see the hull in this position.


I had help from my son Jesse and my employees Bruce and Danny


I have leveled the hull out and secured it against the framing of the shed to avoid having the hull deform since there is no fiberglass on the inside yet but I needed the frames to build the next hull The inside is not glassed yet because I got a pretty bad rash from the epoxy and I wanted to have that healed up before touching the stuff again. I had heard and read that CURED epoxy is inert and since it had set up completly I did not wear any protection while sanding. I have since found out that it can take up to a month for epoxy to fully cure so all the time I had been rubbing uncured epoxy on my skin while wiping the sweat off, brilliant move on my part.