I promised Jo I would spend the day with her today, not build the boat. Every now and then I like to take a day off the boat and go out with Jo and do something fun together. I was repeatedly told before I started building the boat that once I started I would have to say goodbye to any other activity but I have steadfastly refused to adhere to that concept. When the build gets too much or when Jo wins rock paper scissors (kidding) when Jo decides she wants to do something else we do. But having said that, I was really psyched to get the damn forebeam glued. I have put it off for so long now. So I got up at 6am and went in and got it done and was finished by 10.30. I also had time to bog the dingy. Again!

I started by gluing the U bolts into the beam (through the blocks and stainless straps) with the special Techniglue, over a layer of uni wet out where the bolt went through. I did up the nuts up tightly and then threaded on a second nut on each thread doing them up tightly again, then I made a pyramid of glue over the nuts and glassed over them with a layer of double bias, once set there is no way those nuts will ever move! Then once both U bolts were in, I buttered the front edge and centre strip with glue and put the top half of the beam on. I didn’t bother to glue the back edge because they meet sharp corner to corner, so once I had screwed the top down along the front and middle I drove long screws through along the back to pull the edges in really tight and then I smeared a layer of glue in the 90 degree space on the outside edge of the 2 now touching corner. It is not much to hold it but the glue is only a temporary measure to hold pieces together for the time it takes to get glass on. Also this space at the rear will be filled by conduit for most of the length, the conduit is for the tramps to be attached to.

I also bogged a little more of the dingy, I decided with the bows looking fairly good, it really highlighted how bad the sterns and inside bows looked. I am not going to bother with the underside of the boat or the inside of the boat but I wanted the hulls to look good and for a little more work, maybe 3 or 4 more hours, the boat will look so much better. So I applied a thin coat of bog. I will sand it off again, leaving a much smoother finish with the grain of the glass gone. Then I will give it a coat of primer, sand that off too, to a much smoother less porous finish then spray it with cans of spray paint. Then Paul will airbrush the bows and blend out to a solid color at the stern.