Hull webs, Internal fitout

First hull web in

Posted by Paul

During the week I got the rest of the furniture panels glued. The plans have pictures of the panels so you can see exactly how they should look glued together and the numbers of each panel. It is advisable to number the panels whilst they are still in one piece as once you release the parts it can be difficult to tell one part from another, especially when they are as close in shape and size as these parts are.

Once the parts are released it is time to fit them. I have decided to leave the parts in the panel until I need them, this way I know exactly where they are! I started with the walk in wardrobe in the port hull and will work back from there. This is the smallest area. The idea of the webs is they spread the loads that are placed on the hull panels out and provide a base for the sole to be glued to, creating a buoyancy chamber and an extra layer of sealing between your house and the water. Cats unlike most monos are designed to be dry bilged, in fact we don’t have a bilge and will have portable bilge pumps to move from one place to another in case of water ingress, most likely through an open hatch, but there are no permanently fixed bilge pumps.

The web panels will not fit exactly, they probably should but if the bulkheads are just a mm or 2 forward or aft of where they should be it will change the size of the gap so maybe they are made deliberately oversize to accommodate this, because I needed to trim about 5mm from my first one, and I also needed to round the corners off because of the coves on the bulkhead to hulls. All of this is very simple and easy it is really easy to trim them to size. The cross bulkheads on the other hand were too small, again no problem, I just fill the gap with glue, cove it and glass it.

I still have some gaps between the hull panels here and there, so the first thing I do is fill them. I then lay some glass to cover that join, and because I am happier with a thicker hull between me and the wet stuff, instead of a 100mm tape to cover the join I glassed the entire hull floor in one sheet of glass, about 500mm wide straight over the wet filler. Then I buttered the edges of the fore and aft web piece and glued it in place and coved the edges, before glassing it. I wet out the hull glass on the job but I wet the cove glass strips on a sheet of plastic on the bridgedeck. I am still using the main pump so getting resin for wet out, glue or coving means getting up and down off the boat. 2 things will change to minimise this, first I will decant some resin back into the hand pump drums so I can mix up on the bridgedeck and I must start (and finish) some decent steps up to the bridgedeck.

I dry fitted the webs and needed to trim here and there, and will also need to fill here and there. I also checked for lever and square, although this is not that critical. Imagine if the floor were not level, once launched how would you ever know. You cant run a spirit level over the floor because one moment it would be level and an instant later no longer level as you move over waves even on the most gently mooring. Nevertheless I check it and as you can see it is pretty level. It sure feels nice to know but really means nothing. And of course I checked it across and fore and aft!

Because I have wet glass down I cant walk into the space to get to the front part for coving or glass so I had to stretch and balance to reach, which resulted in a fairly messy job, but this is of no consequence because it will all be permanently sealed under the sole once I glue that down, so no one will ever see it again. Having said that, to save weight you should still clean up filler spills etc but it is not critical in these areas.

So tomorrow I should be able to get the next section down, the port bedroom floor.

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Paul