Fixing first Bench Bulkhead and Cabin Bulkhead

We did two bulkheads today. The first bulkhead for the bench and the bulkhead inside of the cabin. We did the gluing and fiberglassing of joints for both bulkheads today itself.

Fixing Cabin Entrance

Today we placed the bulkhead for the cabin entrance. So as from this evening, our boat has an inside part and an outside part. We spent quite a long time gluing the bulkhead and then adding the fiberglass to make the seams watertight and strong.

Adding the glue

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making the fillet joint

bulkhead placed

rope used to prevent boat from getting enlarged while glue dries

We then added the fiberglass in the afternoon. This is because working with epoxy requires that glue and fiberglass is applied with less than 24 hour interval for proper bonding and added strength.

Cuting and glueing inwales into long wood strips

Cutting of the inwales and gunwales required quite a long distance,  in fact longer than our yard permits us to. So, we had to use the road for our cutting. We placed our table-saw on the road and other tables both in front and behind it to cut our wood quite fast. We used "Meranti" wood for our inwales protected inside of the structure of the boat and "Balao" wood for the gunwales exposed to the elements.

cutting the joint to add the two strips of wood.

cutting the joints

cut and ready for use in boat.

Glueing the front deck triangle and cabin top

Cutting 2nd Gunwale and trying our Rockwell tool

Cut our first Gunwale

Today we used our table-saw to cut our plank of "Balao" wood  into a plank of 2.5 inch by one inch thick by 20 feet long. Then we placed it on the boat itself with a huge plank on top to give it the proper curvature required to be used as Gunwale.

(Gunwale : The long thin strip of wood used as edge so that if the boat rubs against a pontoon it won't hurt the skin of the boat but only the gunwale)