Wednesday 15 January 2020

Fitting Footwell Sides & Finishing The Deck Frame

In a previous post I said that I had to dry fit the footwell sides to trim the cockpit deck panels to size.

Here they are, held in place with temporary screws.


I did this before Christmas. The festive season then knocked a two week hole in the build, and it was early January before I glued the sides in place.

It was a straightforward exercise but a problem occurred when I removed the temporary screws. Three of them sheared off at the head.

It was my own fault for using flimsy, used packaging screws which had been in my cupboard for a couple of years. I threw them all away.

The three that broke were of course tight up against the bulkhead and the transom, so impossible to drill out with an ordinary drill.

The Dremel flexible drive fitted with a 3mm twist bit was ideal for this purpose, and it took minutes to remove all three broken screws. More holes to fill later, as here


I marked the screws with a bit of tape and an arrow as they broke so I would not forget which holes they were buried in!

I installed the two remaining stringers for the deck frame at the same time. Here they are, glued and clamped up.


The blue tape on the edges of the cleats was added in anticipation of gluing on the deck panels. I was getting ahead of myself here ... it will be a while before that happens!

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