A spring Puddle Duck update.

Lets start here - Sunday March 11:



There's a mast on that boat.  What a wonderful day that was.  

Some time in November, we switched from Dan's boat, to my boat. 



The first thing to do, was to get my tanks, and foredeck covered.  While Dans boat had a curve to his foredeck, we decided to go with a flat bow on mine, and build some structure for a mast step. 

This little bridge and mast step turned out really impressive.  

And here it is, in the hull.

And the foredeck was installed.  This is all Dan's work.  With our usual process of glue, screw, and remove the screws.  Those screws are the same set we started with two years ago, same ~100 screws.  They've been re-used a lot. 

Skipping forward a few weeks, here's what that looks like after some filling.  If you look in the background, you can see dan working on the keel tunnel.



We also started working on weekends, beyond the usual thursday night build sessions.  One over two weeks, we built my mast.  All 18' of it.

We started with two 2x8x12' boards.  We ripped them down into some 2x4s.

 

And then we scarfed them.



We put in some pins, to help align the boards while clamping. 



Attempting to clamp 18' of mast into a solid 3x3.5" blank would take all the clamps in the world, and then some.  Instead, we decided to screw the boards together.  Just for the gluing process.  Here we have pulled the screws, and have marked the tapers on the mast.



The mast takes up a whole lot of work space in the shop. 



Obviously, at this point, the CG of the mast is about in the middle.  Putting a huge weight 9' over my hull.. if we were going to leave the mast like that.  ... That would not stand.  Lots of time with a bandsaw, a power plane, hand planes, and a router lead to this this mast.



And to show where the CG is, here's Dan holding it at the CG.



The center of gravity really did move something like 4' towards the base of the mast.

So lets get back to the hull.



As mentioned in an earlier picture, we had installed the daggerboard trunk.  But the edges were still rough.



Some time with a router, and we opened up the daggerboard trunk hole, and rounded all the corners.



The boat started feeling touchable, and "finished."  But, it lacked fiberglass.  So that was the next step.

We still have a good bit of glass to go, but since we ran out of epoxy, we had to move onto another project. 

Fitting my mast seemed as good as any.

We only had to trim 1/8" off of one part of the mast to get it to fit properly in the pocket. 



What might have been the proudest moment of building boats this month, is this particular photograph.