Hull webs, Internal fitout, Soles

Main Bedroom web in

Posted by Paul

Today I had a fairly good day, putting in 6 hours and daydreaming for another hour or so. I started on the main bedroom (port) web. I dry fitted it and trimmed where needed. The fore/aft needed about 10mm taken off and the corners rounded and only one of the 4 cross web parts needed trimming, all 4 needed the corners rounded. You need to be careful with the shape of some of these webs. The fore and aft webs taper to match the angle of the hull but there is a top and a bottom, the top is square to the sides so that only the bottom is angled, so that you end up with a level floor. Seems fairly obvious but the taper is very subtle on some of them so you need to check with a square. I also trimmed and dry fitted the sole onto the web I set yesterday in the walk in wardrobe. Neat!

Once I had it all dry fit and level, I set about wetting out the cloth, and gluing in the web. There is very little room to stand to the sides of wet cloth, so I decided to just wet out the very centre of the cloth wide enough for a tape each side so that I would be able to kneel on the still dry cloth and I would wet it out as I went. Once I had the centre of the glass wet I glued down the centre web panel and coved it either side. I then taped each side. Then I glued the forward cross web panels and coved and taped these in and wet out the glass in front of it to finish that section. I then repeated it with the rear cross web parts and wet out the middle section, then I moved through the doorway to the room behind and wet out the rear part of the glass and finished the cove and glass tape of the back of the fore and aft web to the bulkhead.

This was a very slow process and I have decided that for the rest of the webs I will pre glass the hull floors and glue the webs down once it is set so I can stand on the glass. It will mean I will have to sand the glass to glue the web to but most of the remaining under sole areas will have tanks for grey and black water so I would need to sand them anyway so that there is no chance of a flexible tank being torn by a shard of glass. I think with black and grey water tanks a professional non toxic or taste tank is probably not going to be necessary like it is for fresh water and I may be able to make my own. I mean I think it only needs to be water and airtight with outlets and breathers where I need them. I have to do a little more research.

port bedroom web insb hull floor glassed

It is quite incredible the difference to the feel of the living space the soles make. Because the hull flares rapidly only about 300mm of height more than doubles the width of the floor from about 300mm at the keel to about 600mm in the fore of the bedroom to about 800mm at the rear of it. In the saloon hulls the floor is a meter wide and changes what feels like a cramped hull into a wide floor. You cant notice the loss of headroom that the web and sole makes yet as there is no roof but the standing headroom is going to end up at 2 meters which is pretty good. I am 182 cm so I wont have to crouch except through the doors but not by much.

All in all a fun day. I think I have regained my full motivation. I have had a tough work week so it was great to just forget about work for a couple of days and immerse myself in the build. My back doesn’t agree but it is kind of nice relaxing on the couch after a shower and a sore body from working hard all day.

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Paul