Well, That Was A Mess

Well, now that was a mess. If you remember that in an early post about the Dave boats I said that Dave went to great lengths to build hulls without using staples. The staples hold the strips in place while the glue dries. Dave built an incredibly complex form with a kazillion clamping surfaces to clamp the strips rather than staple them.

This hull is the fifth hull that he built and somehow he was able to pop the hull off of the form on each of the other four boats. For the life of me I can't figure out how he did it. The form was so complex that there wasn't room to clean up excess glue while stripping the hull. There were just too many places where the hull was stuck to the form. I spent too many hours thinking of how to separate the two and I could never solve the riddle. His widow told me when she brought this hull to my house still on the form that she had no desire to keep the form. That worked out well because I had to take the form apart to separate the form from the hull.

The form fought me every step of the way and it was three days of pulling, pushing, chiseling, sawing and hammering before I was done. I took out about 1/2 of the form in little pieces before I could separate the hull from the form. Unfortunately the hull split in 7 different places from all the stress of freeing it from the form. One of the splits went from one end of the boat to the other. I've been able to glue all of the splits back together and the hull will be fine when I get fiberglass on it. The irony of this story is that in gluing the splits back together I had to use staples to hold things together while the glue dried.

I've now got to glue the laminates together to make the stems, get them glued to the hull, shaped and sanded and ready for fiberglass.

I have to add that as soon as the weather allows the form will be the centerpiece of a bonfire out back.