GV 10 dinghy progress - moved from my long suffering friend Cheryl's basement to her garage to build the dinghy. Stitched the hull together tonight. 1-3/4 hours.

Time to date: 6-3/4 hours.

Progress on the big boat continues as well. I have got the carbon chainplates all glassed in and hopefully watertight. And I've started work on what has to be one of the few carbon / nomex outboard motor brackets around.

One of the few times I've had to say that "stupid previous owner". He liked to fasten down hardware with through bolts that are embedded in epoxy. This cam cleat has machine screws about 2" long epoxied into a solid mahogany backing block. Heating them doesn't really help because if they get too hot they melt the cleat. Boiling wasn't hot enough. So I'm drilling down around the cleat through the remnants of the deck and backing block and will have to chisel the piece off. A nice hour long job.

I've started building my GV10 dinghy - the tender for the big boat. I sell plans for it here:
http://boatplans-online.com/proddetail.php?prod=GV10

Tonight's progress:

- mark out all the panels and frames
- cut them out
- glass 3 of 4 of the hull panels and 1 of the 2 frames. Just didn't have enough epoxy. It's all on the big boat where I have gallons of the stuff.

5 hours to date

Chainplates under way

For the past year the rig has been held in position with short lengths of rope to the rigging wires turbuckles. This has been because we raised the mast so the boom would clear the new cabin. But the mast is rather "loose" and bounces around a lot when a big wake hits the boat.

But now, finally, the chainplates are going in. This will be nice as summer (and the jetskiers and wakeboarders) approaches so I can properly tension all the rigging.

You first start with about 30m of carbon fiber unidirectional fabric 300mm wide.


Laminate this over a stainless steel pipe that is suspended in mid air. When hard, cut into individual chainplates. This is hard work - the thick walled s.s. pipe was way overkill (but it's i.d. happened to match the clevis pin diameter). Note to self - next time use just a thin s.s. bushing.

It took 2 hours to cut 3 slices and form the four chainplates into these: