Again looking ahead I could see I'd want to put a rudder on this boat sometime, so I started looking into gluing together the head that holds the rudder. This is made up of a sandwich of plywood pieces.
The two outer pieces have areas that bear against the rudder allowing it to pivot up, and the tiller that gets inserted into the top. These two areas get a layer of fiberglass cloth. I traced the outline of the inner plywood pieces and applied some 6 oz fiberglass cloth.
I filled the weave with thickened epoxy left over from one of the other gluing jobs.
And then scraped/sanded that smooth. I think I will finish this off with an epoxy/graphite mixture for abrasion resistance.
I also have been trying to figure out what stock to use for the mast, boom, and yard -- the important pieces that carry the sail. I visited the local big box lumber yard a couple times trying to find something usable. And I think I could have made that work with a lot of waste and a lot of scarf joints. And a lot of time spent.
I finally decided to go first class and took a day off from work to make the 400+ mile trip to McCormick Lumber in Madison, WI, who stocks Sitka Spruce, catering to the local iceboat crowd as well as shipping across the country.
I got four boards - 6" and 9" wide, straight grain, no knots, 16 feet long. Just beautiful! Yes, and expensive. But beautiful!
I'm going to have to move the saw, planer, router table, and dust collector out to the garage to process these, as my shop isn't big enough to handle them inside with the boat in there. I'll need the full board length on both the infeed and outfeed sides of the machines.
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