Installing watertight bulkhead hatches

The watertight bulkhead hatches were installed, they will be loosely tightened down on the seal and will be able to be really tightly sealed if there is any collision. The reason they will be loosely sealed is that if they are really tight the air inside can expand or contract causing a pressure difference, depending on the temp and water temp. They will have blue Dow Corning wallmate roofmate foam inside for positive buoyancy.

This is the bow collision bulkhead, as built the bottom is well above the DWL, and the opening is big enough that I can get easily inside to do things, check things.the rear hatches are the same, I am able to reach easily inside to do, fix, check, and repair things.

 

 The Shaped tiller on the faired deck

The Deck was faired with a microballoon and fumed silica mix, the cabin sides were overcoated twice with an epoxy and fumed silica mix, although it is harder to sand , it worked really well, there was no need to use microballons on the cabin sides as the two layers of glass created a really fair surface with no bump where the tape would have been if only one glass layer had been used, this small amount of extra glass instead of adding fairing compound between the tape was a good choice IMHO it adds strength and stiffness to the hull deck cabin joint.

This is the detail of the cabin side versus the cabin top/deck, showing the difference between the microballoon fairing mix and the epoxy fumed silica finish, my last ply epoxy boat was built without using peelply or microballoons , just epoxy+glass with a a fill coat of epoxy, and then a fill coat of fumed silica epoxy mix - all wet on  semi-wet, then sanded and a final coat of a ceramic epoxy flowcoat, that is used on floors and walls of  industrial food processing plants, hospital operating theatres etc, and it was super tough, it was almost like a marble epoxy coating, and it has lasted extremely well, then the flowcoat had a very light sand and had a 2pack poly paint applied, and the finish was superb. Lets hope this one looks as good.

BTW you can see the positioning lines for the chainplates, a hint to all other builders, Remember to mark the DWL and the centre lines and the positions of the chainplates throughout the build, so that you can use them all the way through, I have the DWL and centres marked under the boat available, it saves a lot of leveling etc especially mark the dwl for inside positioning and also mark it on the outside of the hull.

 Fairing - the icing on the cake

fairing epoxy has been applied - the deck is quite fair already so this is a really thin layer and will not take long to sand it fair, already thinking about paint and colours -