centreboard pattern

Right now I'm mostly working on filleting and glassing the floors and bulkheads. This is tedious work but I'm close to done and a post will be forthcoming.
As a small sideproject, I have been making the centreboard pattern for casting. Mike Randall was very generous to send me a full size PDF that he made from the plans of the centreboard. I got this printed and was shocked but also excited to see how big the centreboard will be.
I cut out the paper patterns for the centreboard shape and the foils and then marked these onto MDF. After cutting and planing these pieces to size, I glued them together and glued in slabs of polystyrene foam.
The fun bit came next. I borrowed a hot wire cutter from a friend who makes model aircraft wings using this same method. This was a 1 metre long wire connected to a power box that I could tension or slacken as required and I simply dragged it along the foils to hot cut the foam and get the shape of the centreboard.

I have now coated this with a layer of fairing compound to allow me to sand it smooth (there are surface marks because I was not so good with the wire) and then I'll send it to the foundry for casting.

turnover day

Without planning it to be auspiscious ( because I don't believe in that stuff) Turnover Day ended up being on the 1st of January.

All went smoothly. I had friends come over at 11 am. Beforehand, I made cinnamon scrolls and detached the boat from the jig and got my trailer ready.

8 of us lifted it off the jig and most of the molds fell out as we were moving. We walked it down off the platform onto the grass and rolled it over gently onto two mattresses mostly missing the mattresses (lucky for the soft grass).

Then we positioned the trailer in place and as we winched, we pushed the trailer so that the boat didn't have to slide. The trailer was then backed into the shed once again and I used a laser level to set up up level.

A milestone for sure but I know I have a lot of hard work ahead of me!!

brass protective strip

The last job to do before turning the hull over was to attach the brass strips to the bottom of the hull to protect from abrasion. I bought 19mm half-oval brass strip at great expense and the cringed at the thought of putting holes in my hull to screw it on. I talked to a few people who recommended an adhesive called fixtech 190 that would be better than screws, which I believed, but I still needed some way to hold the strips down while the glue cured.
So, in the end, I bit the bullet and used screws through the brass to hold it in place and used fixtech 190 as a glue/bedding compound (it is very flexible stuff).
I wanted to have no plywood, especially end grain, exposed to the elements so i did it this way. I drilled and counter sunk all my holes in to the brass strip (400mm apart). I then used self-tapping screws to attach the strips to the boat. I removed all the screws and the strips. I then drilled 10mm holes using the hole left by the screw as a guide. these holes were went in approximately 12mm into the 16mm plywood of the sole.

 I then mixed some bote-cote epoxy with TPRDA and used a pipette to fill each hole and allowed the stuff to soak into the grain then I sucked the excess out. I then filled the hole with silica-thickened epoxy

 and before it was fully hard, cut it flush and drilled holes about 10mm deep in their centres. These were then used to attach the brass strip using silicon bronze wood screws and fixtech 190.
A tedious process but I feel secure knowing that there's no plywood exposed at all.