Still Fairing

I’ve had a lot of comments recently, all basically amounting to, “I’m tired of looking at that damn fly. Put up a report.” So, I’ll give you guys what I’ve got ……. and what I’ve got is fairing. The bow seam and transom edges need some work, but otherwise the whole boat now has a rough fair on it. By this I mean that all surfaces have had at least 2 coats of Quickfair pulled on and then sanded off with the random orbit. This has eliminated pretty much all fiberglass edges and smoothed out the majority of the big imperfections. It's tough to tell because of the patchy color, but it's all pretty smooth.

It's tough to get a good pic of the boat in it's entirety in the small work space. I'll make sure to take lots of pictures when we flip it. What remains is work on the bow and transom, filling a slight dip where the hull panels were spliced together, longboarding the crap out of the whole thing, and then putting a slight radius on all the hard edges. But all that has to wait. I'm about to get the hell out of the bum-ridden crimefest Gainesville is becoming. This means I have one month to get the boat ready for transport, so I am abandoning the fairing at its current state and going to concentrate on making the thing structurally sound. First step in this is the rubrail. Unlike in many production boats, the rubrail on the FS18 (and a lot of other Bateau designs) is integral to the strength of the hull. It is composed of three layers of the same 1/4” ply that the rest of the hull is made from. After I sand the fairing compound off the edge of the sides, these are glued on in a sandwich about an inch and a half wide. Here’s a 1 ½” strip that I marked as a guide and then sanded off.

Once the rubrail is complete, we will pop the empty hull off of the strongback (looking forward to this step), leaving behind all of the framing still aligned and attached to the base. The inside seams will be filleted and taped, and then the inside will be sheathed in a layer of glass like the outside was. Once it’s all cured the stringers will be filleted and taped into the hull and then it should be plenty strong enough to load onto my dad’s flatbed trailer and move to it’s new home in the Panhandle. Here I can take my time and finish the inside right instead of trying to rush through the whole thing. Bonus. For a better explanation of all of this stuff, check out Bayport Bob’s website in the sidebar. He’s already done it and has pictures of the whole process.

I wish I were progressing faster, but fairing is a slow process and things have been totally hectic recently. It’s definitely one of those things that you just have to do an hour or two at a time and trust that you’re making progress because nothing obvious is getting done. I have had a lot of things take precedence over the boat in the past few months. I'm trying to get all my loose ends tied up here. Cole moved to P-cola, so he and I took one last fishing trip before he left, down to Sanibel in search of our first snook, especially on the fly. We had limited success but a good time. Some faces were rocked. We reached the conclusion that snook are awesome and we would like to catch more of them. Check out Cole’s report on his website in the side bar. Between that, trying to pack the house up, finding a place to live in the Panhandle, and ramped up intensity in the lab, making progress on the boat has been and will continue to be a challenge. Posts may be infrequent until I get settled in August, but I’ll do my best.