Paul Gartside 18' Racing Gaff Cutter • Cabinversion designed by Dominik Gschwind

2012-09-21

Week 10 - Inside sheating / Beamshelf


Taking off the hull from the moldes and turning it to it's upright position was an exiting moment.
Now the plan was to get the insidesurface ready for sheating with biaxial glasscloth and epoxy in 2 days.
First step was to clean the surface from all glue excess, a surprisingly easy job that worked really well with a chisel. Then the whole stripplankingsurface got scuffed off. Similar to the scuffing off on the outside of the hull we move the plane in diagonal strokes over the strips and take the highspots off.
The plane used is an old wooden bollowplane followed by a flat spokeshave.
After that we sanded the whole surface with a DA-sander which works really effectiv and well.
After a prudent go with the vacuumer the hull was smooth and more or less dustfree.

Now it was time to cut the fiberglasscloth in overlapping panels. Again here the same deal as on the outside so 2 layers of 300 gr/m2 biaxial each.

Sheating the inside of the hull is definitely a little bit more tricky than the outside because of the narrow workspace and the fact that the glass was divided in 2 sides by the hog.

We were 2 guys working inside the hull balancing on the hog which was protected from the resin by a plastictape. Principially ok but during the laminationwork   epoxy resin dropped to the surface of the hog and thisone got more and more slippery.
Another 4 guys helped from outside the hull.
On the photo above you can see details of the biaxial cloth both in loose and laminated condition. 

After trimming the sheer to it's lofted line we finally could get a good imagination of Glóey's future deck and transom.
This was the right moment to level the boat. We used a selflevelling laser on a tripod to position the boat correctly. I was very happy that we did mark the DWL waterline on the hull as long as thisone was upside down on the moldes. So it was relatively easy to align to this referenceline in the upright position. While the boat was layed on 2 heavy wooden blocks and 2 strong posts clamped to the hull held it in the level position we built a strong cradle.
On the photo above the laserlines are visible both on the centre of the stem as well as along the waterline.
We kept the pads of the cradle just below the waterline to make it easier to paint the hull later. So we will be able to first paint above the waterline and then apply the antifouling after.
Time to glue the beamshelf consisting of 2 pieces of douglas fyr 3" x 1 1/4". Because of the quite strong twist there was a lot of tension on it when fitting it to the sheer and therefore we had to do it in 2 steps. And now we have a really strong sheer which is ready to get the whole deckframing inside...