Dinghy

More work on the dingy

Posted by Paul

Today I taped all of the external hull panel joins. I sanded the sharp edges off the joins and rounded them, coved the right angle of the bridgedeck to hull joins and taped them all, using my usual method of wetting out the tapes on a flat bench with a paint brush and squeegee and rolling them up to take to the job and rolling them out onto the boat, smoothing the air bubbles out as I go.

dingy chines sandeddingy ready for glass

Once the hull joins were rounded (with a router, then a disc grinder to further remove the sharp edge) and sanded smooth and then all the dust and balsa sawdust cleaned off I then started coving the 90 degree hull to deck joins and filling any holes in the panels that will be under the tape. The balsa edges also needed some filling. I will be applying the wet tape onto wet filler so I wont need to sand any of these filled areas.

dingy hull glasseddingy peel ply ondingy hull coved glassed

I started at the coved tapes first because they are on the inside of the boat. I didn’t want to have to lean over freshly taped joins so it made sense to work from the inside out. The open balsa edges were coated with resin before glassing so that the resin soaked into the grain a little deeper. As I finished each tape I applied re-cycled peel ply. It is not recommended (to re-use peel ply) but I find it still keys the surface well and we will probable feather some bog over the tapes to blend them out but wont do this until later so it saves a bit of sanding.

On Saturday we hope to get the forward bulkhead glued in and the rest of the internal joins coved and taped. Then all that will be left will be to seal all of the exposed balsa ends and attach the hull tops. Then we may give it a quick bog and fair before a couple of coats of resin to seal the hull ready for a test run.

I managed 4 hours on the dingy today and Warren dropped by for about an hour for a total of 26 hours for me and about 20 hours for Warren. I think about 30 hours each will see one dingy finished and perhaps another 12 hours each will see the second one finished if there are not too many modifications to be made.

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Paul