I used the last of the hardener for bog for the foredeck strip panel. Odd choice I know but I have more hardener arriving Tuesday and it seemed as good a job as any to get onto. Actually I doubted I would have enough hardener to wet out the last layer of glass on the second dagger, I wasn’t even sure although it turned out I would have had, enough to glass the inside of the next dagger case in the jig. The problem with running out of resin or in this case hardener, but same result, during a glass wet out is that you ruin the glass if you cant finish the wet out, it must be removed and thrown out, you cant finish where you run out and wet the rest out later. But with bog, if you run out half way you can bog the rest later.

So the first task for the day was to sand the second dagger to key the surface, remove unevenness and splinters overhanging the edges (uni does not go around corners) and generally clean the board up ready for the final layer of double bias and surfboard cloth layers over the edges around corners etc and seal the board. It is now ready to glass as soon as I have the hardener. I will also have the sheaves this coming week so I will cut the slots for them and fit them.

With that done, a friend Sam arrived to help out a bit. Sam and his brother will start on a Spirited 380 later this year, Amnon has been offering to help for months and I kept declining as I felt guilty having him sanding or some other bum job on the build, but they keep insisting so who am I to argue! So with no resin to glass anything we had no choice but to sand something. There are 2 constants in boat building, glassing and sanding! We stood the dagger up against the boat to free up the drums and removed the panel Sam and I glassed last weekend, the foredeck turn. I had previously glassed the outside and Sam and I glassed the inside and put it back on the boat to set. With it set we removed it and sanded the thin wipe of bog down, I figure that you have to sand a glass lay up once it sets before you can bog it in order for the bog to stick (unless you peel-ply it but peel ply is difficult to apply over large curved surfaces) so if you have to sand anyway you may as well give it a bog wipe wet on wet as you may have enough bog on to get the surface fair and if not you are no worse off, and bog is easier to sand than resin on glass and gives you a clearer indication you are near to sanding through glass (once the bog is gone you know you are near to the glass).

Once the bog was sanded down in a fair sort of way but still not actually fair, so in other words we used long boards and hand sanded it so it would at least be getting fair, we then applied some fresh bog and pulled the notched scraper through to leave bog strips. Tomorrow we can fair that ready to back fill once fair. I am not sure if we should sand off the boat though. If you fair it off the boat, even though the panel is rigid having been glassed both sides, it may still pull down out of fair when glued down onto the boat so better to glue it on the boat first then fair it, although I cant imagine it would move far and if it did move a little it would just need a little more fairing…so I am undecided.

We removed the inside bow panels ready to glass them inside (again once I have hardener) and with them off, the section are open beckoning me to fit the keelsons and finish the coving and taping inside the forward collision cell. These are jobs I have thought about a lot, and put off as long as I can, I have pestered James with questions about alternative methods to no avail, he said to me today that if I spent half the time working on them as I did coming up with ideas on how I can avoid doing them, the job would have been done months ago!

Sam worked for 3 hours today, I did 6 and 2 yesterday so I am happy with the hours getting put in. I also note that 2 guys get more done in the same hours than 1 guy doing double. On your own whatever you are doing, glassing, bogging etc stops while you mix more up etc, but with 2 one keeps going while the other mixes etc. I am going to use help when I do the keelsons, that way I can get inside the hull and instead of having to climb in and out to get materials I can have them passed to me, this saves considerable time and also energy climbing in and out.

I am not sure yet what I am doing tomorrow. I usually have a plan or an idea of what I am going to do, but with no hardener the jobs are narrowed down to sanding. There are hours and hours of sanding jobs to do so I wont have any trouble filling a day, its getting the motivation that may prove difficult.