Not much work on the boat today. Just an hour and all I got done was to cut the slot in the trailing edges for the fibreglass batten with a hand saw and I glued them into the dagger blanks. Cutting these slots was into the daggers was not easy. The trailing edge is only 6mm or 7mm wide, I have not shaped the last 10mm or so with the router leaving about 30mm edge to cut into, but the cut needs to be about 20mm deep so if the cut is off centre or not running down the centreline the saw will cut a hole in the side of the blank. So I was extra careful when cutting this slot which almost guaranteed that I would make a mess of it! Whilst it was not a complete mess I did run off centre here and there but the hand saw did not protrude out of the side of the blank anywhere.
Once I had cut the slots I sanded each of the battens to key them. Then I mixed some glue and whilst holding open the slot I filled each with glue, and then inserted the battens into the slots. I then smeared some extra glue along the edges to be sure there were no gaps and that the foam was in good contact with the batten. Once set I will finish the shaping of the trailing edge. The glued in battens will stiffen the edge up a little to make the shaping a little easier.
The idea of the batten is to provide something solid that glass can be glued to. Glass wont go around such a tight corner so the idea will be to glue to the batten on each side of the blank (glass will go around the leading edge as it is a much gentler round turn as opposed to a sharp trailing edge). Then once the glass is set the batten gets sanded down along with the glass to create a sharp edged square corner trailing edge about 5mm wide and straight.
When the glass is on and set the trailing edge will be a combination of batten and solid glass and will be about somewhat thicker than it will end up and sanding it back down to the final size will take out the slight kinks I have in the middle of one of the battens. Hopefully I will get the glass cut tomorrow and then later in the week I may get time to get one of the boards glassed and the second one done on the weekend, if not then both of them done on the weekend so I can start on the cases.
