Thankfully no-one will ever see the glassing inside bulkhead 0. Whilst it was stuck down and is effective, I have a lot of very sharp jagged edges in there. But I always knew it didnt have to be pretty it just had to be effective.
I replaced the front bulkhead pieces dry and using the stainless straps as templates I drilled my bolt holes. Unfortunately my drill only takes 10mm bits and the bolts are 12mm so I needed to use the drill to ream the holes out a little, no biggie but not as neat or tight fitting as a 12mm hole. I had already de-cored and backfilled a 25mm area through the duflex around the hole so what I will do when ready to bolt the strap on and glass it all closed is fill the drill holes with glue again before putting the strap back on and tightening the nuts.
I suppose you are wondering how I plan to tighten the nuts with no access to the bolts? I have glassed the bolt heads to the inside ply panel is how. I put a big dob of glue in the middle of a 100mm square piece of glass and positioned the glue over the bolt and pushed it all down with the glass and let it set. This should hold the bolts enough to get them tight enough that the washer inside starts to get serious grip of the ply pad. The bulk of the load that this strap needs to handle is away from the bulkhead so the combination of the bolts and some glass across the strap should handle that load with ease. And the glass each side ensure the nut and bolt cannot loosen over time.
Next step will be to glass the front of bulkhead 0, then glass the ply pad and s/s strap on then I can start on making the shaped bows. As mentioned I cant attach them until the boat is turned but I can make them in readiness. In the meantime I am looking out for dolly wheels capable of handling 250kg each (one for each corner of each of the 4 cradles = 16 x 250kg = 4000kgs) or 4 really serious dolly wheels of 1000kg each and I will make a single bigger dolly about 2 meters square that can the boat can sit on from the underside of bridgedeck.
As usually happens with boat building timing, the fairing or the window workers have not started yet. The fairing is waiting for me to get the nose cones in, but the window guy has just been held up on other jobs. After the fantastic progress last month, this month has slowed again, but I guess progress is never linear and each task completed gets me that little bit closer to launch.
