2688Hrs – Sun Beams

Another solid eight hours of productive work today, helped along by the warmest day of the year so far with lots of very welcome sunshine.

I love how the work just flows along on days like these.

I’ve now got the beams more or less ready to remove from the boat for glassing and painting.

First job was to make up the packers that drop in between the beam trough sides and the beam. The little bench planer made it easy to make each piece of UHMW a nice fit although I’ve had to modify my idea slightly. I quickly realised that there were a few places where the tolerance between the beam and beam trough side was too tight to allow me to insert two pieces of UHMW face to face, reason being that it’s impossible to stick UHMW PVC so I’ll be drilling, countersinking and fixing with screws. (Answer to your question Mike!) That means each piece has to be thick enough to allow me to countersink the screw head whilst still leaving enough ‘meat’ to get a firm fixing.

This means that there are about 4 or 5 places where there will only be one piece of UHMW, it’ll potentially be in direct contact with the fibreglassed beam but I really don’t see it being a problem. There will be minimum movement and it’ll be rubbing against epoxied fibreglass.

Once the beams were all packed I measured and marked the cutting points at the outboard end of each beam. These cut ends will be finished with a hardwood pad and I’ve actually made them overhang the hull sides a little more than the plans. Two reasons for that, first they will give a bit more protection to the hull alongside harbour walls if I hang big fenders off them and secondly I’ll be able to store things like fishing rods and oars on top of them (thanks to Beat on ‘Aluna’ for that tip).

As you can see in the photo below I’ll have to add in a bit of timber to fill in the extra length. You can also see the extra packers sitting in the well.

Last job of the day was to drill the pilot holes to mark the positions of the stainless steel securing pins that run fore and aft on the hull centre line through each beam and trough. I took my time with this making sure that the drill started in the right place and stayed square an level all the way through. It all went fine.

So as I say, I’m now ready to lift the beams down again and get cracking on finishing them. It’s a big job and one I’m eager to get crossed off.