Bottom’s Up

April 20, 2015  Hours spent building to date:  957

Well of course the bottom’s up, since the boat is upside down — for about another week.  But it is now nicely painted with two coats of black bottom paint.

I’ve had several shop visitors ask how it is possible to know where the waterline is with the boat nowhere near the water.  Mark has solved that problem by cleverly designing the building frame so that the waterline is exactly 69 inches from the floor at all points.  So I Gorilla-taped a laser level to an appropriately-sized board, and made sure it was plumb using a clever two-way level from the hardware store designed for setting fence posts.  I leveled things up and shot red laser dots at the boat, Ray put a real green dot over the red ones, and we had a waterline marked that looks pretty good — although to an old sailor used to heavy keelboats, it does look like a lot of the hull is out of the water.  Time will tell.

One negative note marred an otherwise successful procedure.  Saturday we had the first really good, warm day of spring, so I opened up the big overhead door at the end of the shop to let the fumes out as I painted.  As the sunlight streamed horizontally past the hull, I could see  ripples and epoxy drips in the finish near the stern in areas that were done before I had the big screeding tool.  The artificial light from overhead just didn’t show them, but they will surely show with shiny topside paint.

So I will have to get out the sanders, screeds and fairing compound once again — next winter!!

High-tech waterline marker

Taping waterline

God my butt hurts!