A short day for everyone today but some good progress nevertheless. We started the day by scraping off lots of dried glue from around the floor battens....which look great by the way! Mr Alp's patented floor batten attaching device worked perfectly! We also scrapped and sanded the centre-board case as well the rudder pieces. We finished off the day by putting a second coat of epoxy on the inner tanks. It was a lot cooler than we would have liked so it takes a little longer for epoxy to dry. Good work everyone!

After a well earned break over the Easter weekend we were back at it today. The most notable change you will see is the change in venue. The boat has migrated from Mr Alp's workshop in the basement to his garage. You may see that 'our' boat has some company with a second boat that Mr Alp is building for his daughter. It's nice to see what a finished (or almost finished) boat looks like. We started the day with some terrific excitement when Riley cut his finger pretty deeply with a chisel. Scouter Larry whisked Riley off to the hospital for a few stitches while the rest of us mopped up blood....okay it wasn't that bad...but Riley you can now say that you've put blood and sweat into the boat! Fortunately the cut was not too deep and Riley will be back to build again soon. Today we cleaned up the deck rails, installed the shroud blocks as well as the floor battens.

Yesterday's crew taped and sealed the inside seams of the boat. Today's crew secured the bulkheads in place and taped and epoxied them in. Think of the outside of the boat as its' skin and the bulkheads as its' skeleton. Today the skeleton was secured. All the work we have done so far making sure the boat was perfectly aligned, straight and level has paid off. The structure and shape of the boat is now pretty much permanent. We will really see some big progress in the days ahead as one of the next big steps is adding the decks. Not as many photo's today as the blog photographer (Me!) had his hands full helping out. Great work everyone... you are now official "fibre-glassers" ! 54 days to launch!!!

For those of you who spent all that time and effort sewing the boat together with bits of copper wire, you will be happy to hear that today we cut and pulled it all out! Last week we epoxied the seams together and they held together nicely...well done! We were able to pull out all the wire and started to tape the inside seams together with fibreglass tape and epoxy. This was a great opportunity for everyone to do some fibreglass work. While the tape and epoxy was drying we had a chance to sand the tiller and centre-board case and apply a second coat of epoxy. Good work today everyone!

This weekends building activities ended on a sticky note as we applied our first bit of epoxy to the seams of the boat as well as a few key pieces like the centre-board case that was assembled yesterday. Once again we had to spend a fair bit of time getting all the pieces of the boat perfectly aligned, but now that the boat is being stuck together we will start to see some real progress. The builders today had a number of good questions about the epoxy we used. I have included a link on the home page titled "sticky-stuff" in case you wanted to learn a little bit more about it. Good job to everyone this weekend...  61 days till launch.

If last weekend was all about drilling holes and sewing with copper wire, today was all about glue, clamps, and patience, patience, patience. We had lots of glue....and Mr Alp has a lot of clamps....like A LOT of clamps... we need to work on our patience. Only 62 days to launch day!