iceboating.net Minnesota Ice Sailing Association

Previous entries: Day-1, Day-2, Day-3, Day-4.

Today was something of a milestone. For the first time since the crash (two weeks ago, almost to the hour) there aren't any major "extra" pieces waiting to be glued back in place!

The projects I needed to get done today were fairly straightforward: patch the hole in the bow with a scarfed-in piece and fiberglass the inside of the cockpit. As a bonus, I also got the knee reattached.

The first order of business was the usual removal of clamps and clean-up of excess epoxy from the previous session.

The scarf repair was pretty basic. The hole was mostly rectangular already, so all i needed to do was cleean it up a bit, and angle the fore/aft ends of the hole. A bit of work on the band-saw, planer, and sander turned a scrap if Sitka into a patch. I attached it with WEST epoxy and Cotton filler, then covered it with a fiberglass patch (probably overkill). I clamped the assembly together with a piece of scrap plywood cover in wax-paper and turned the boat so the patch was on the bottom. I hoped this would keep the epoxy from running out of the joints; it also placed the inside wall of the cockpit facing up so I could work on it.

I took some of the thickened eopxy left over from the scarf and troweled it onto the areas of the sideboard where there was a thin layer of wood missing so the surface was mostly level. While the epoxy was curing to the gel-state, I got out the fiberglass that Wes Wilcox gave me when I couldn't find the stash in the Boatwerks (Thanks again, Wes!). Wes had two weights of unidirectional glass. One was very heavy, roving-like, and the other about 6 oz. 80:20 fabric unidirectional. I used small pieces of the heavy material for local reinforcement where there were multiple cracks in the sideboard near the knee, and laid the 6 oz. cloth over the rest of the inside of the sideboard. I carefully squeegeed the cloth into contact with the wood with a plastic scraper.

Earlier, I'd dry-fit the knee in place, grinding out any shards that wouldn't fit snugly together. To reinforce the joint between the broken-off top piece of the knee, I added a 3mm plywood piece on either side:

Six more hours today. Total = 22...