Ready for fairing

After a couple more days of work, Seven Wonders is ready for pre-skin fairing.

First, a bit about the technique I worked out for creating Spanish windlasses.

You start by screwing a pipe hanger onto the board that needs to be pulled into position:

Next, you have to decide what direction the board needs to move. In this case, you can see that the chine is already sitting nicely on the notch board, but there is a horizontal gap between the chine and the outside edge of the flare form. The Spanish windlass will therefore need to pull horizontally to achieve the alignment we want.

Next step is to find a suitable location on the jig to install the eye cleat:

I drill a pilot hole, then screw it securely into place.

Now, get your wire. I bought a spool of 14 gauge wire at Home Depot.

I loop the wire through the pipe hanger, then measure it for rough length so that both ends end up four inches or so longer than is needed to reach the eye cleat.

Then I take a ViceGrips, grab one of the loose ends, pull it reasonably tight, and then fasten it around the wire by giving it a few wraps.

I will end up looking like this.

Then I grab the other end with the ViceGrips, and wrap it around the wire as well.

You will end up with this.

I've installed a dozen of these now, and never had one pull loose.

Next, all you need to do is take a spike and wind the windlass tight.

I bought the biggest spikes I could find at HD. They were only $0.60 ea, and it makes it a lot easier to crank these down when you have some good leverage.

Crank it down tight, keep an eye on the board you are trying to move, and presto! Perfect alignment. The wire seems to take a set, so there is no problem with the windlass trying to spring back. Just turn it a couple of turns beyond what you need and it will stay in place.

Now for the boat: I got the ends of the chines glued into place last night. Cutting the chine support blocks was a trick. The angles on those gets pretty extreme, particularly on the bow end. It took a bit of trial and error to get those in place. I ended up deciding that "good enough" was good enough, and relying on thickened epoxy to fill in the gaps. Here is the starboard side stern joint:

And the port side bow joint:

Somehow, I got off on the port side stern joint, and ended up with a big epoxy filler to make it fit. No worries. This is going to be plenty strong:

I'll sand off all the excess in the process of fairing the boat. With a bit of cleanup on the inside, I think those joints/blocks are going to come out fine.

Here are a few shots of the overall boat prior to fairing:

For the most part, everything has lined up pretty well. There is a spot in the middle where the keelson is standing a bit proud. I think some windlasses on the keelson will pull it down into position. If not, I'll sand off a bit on the keelson so everything is flat side to side.

Torturing the chines into place was tough. The bend at the bow end was pretty severe. What I found was that I needed to clamp the chine in the middle of the boat, then use a windlass to pull the bow end down into position. This was before I put the chine blocks in place. After the chines were lined up, then I carved the blocks and epoxied them in.

In contrast, for the stern I made the blocks and installed them, then used windlasses to pull the chines down tight into the blocks.

Those ends were by far the trickiest part of the project so far. Glad they are done!