More Coating of Parts and Small Details

After finishing the first epoxy coat on all the lower hull panels Saturday, the next afternoon I coated all the topside panels for both hulls. The weather was sunny and warm enough for the epoxy to cure before dark. With all the hull panels coated and placed back in storage in the shed, I returned to Jackson Monday morning to go back to work on the job I'm doing and to continue work on the bulkheads, stems and skegs in the garage workshop. There are still a lot of details to complete before I can begin hull assembly. Since I'm working on all the parts for both hulls, it takes double the time it would take to just get ready for the first hull assembly. But the advantage is that all these little jobs will be complete when I get ready to start wiring the second hull together.

Some other steps I plan to complete before assembly include such details as pre-drilling the skegs for the rudder lashings while I can more accurately do this on my bench top drill press. I will first drill oversized holes and fill these with a silica epoxy compound, then drill the correct sized holes through the cured epoxy so that no wood will be exposed to possible water ingress through these holes. These kinds of steps will delay the beginning of building the hull, which I'm anxious to start, but in the long run it will make such jobs easier than working in an awkward, vertical position. By the time all these jobs are complete and all the epoxy coats are on all these parts and the new roof is done on my shed, the weather will be steadily getting better here in Mississippi and the days will be getting longer. I'm only three weeks into the project, and have logged as of today, 44 hours of labor. I expect to be well into building the hulls by March or April.