May 17, 2015 Hours spent building to date: 1,040
If Phase I was the hull, Phase II has to be bonding and basic carpentry. Basically every piece of wood installed to date has to be glued to every other piece of wood with various combinations of epoxy, biaxial fiberglass tape and regular weave fiberglass tape. This creates a hugely strong structure that accepts all forces evenly no matter which way they are coming. As I’ve mentioned in the past, traditional wooden boats are strong front-to-back and side-to-side, but do a lot of bending in the twisting forces of large waves. This “web” construction pretty much eliminates that.
Since bonding is a pretty boring process somewhat akin to fairing, I plan to split my days into three pieces — about 40% bonding, 40% carpentry, and 20% staring at the plans and figuring out next steps. That seems to be a high proportion of daydreaming, but I need to make sure that I don’t have to unbuild a section that’s already built in for installation of a critical system. For instance, the area Mark has designated for the refrigerator won’t take the one I want, since that is just where the hull starts curving toward the bow. But hours of measurement later, I figured out it would fit under the stove-top.
This week’s bonding project was epoxy fillets along all the small fore-and-aft stringers, which took 12 tubes of epoxy because there are a lot of them. I was pretty happy with the stringers’ bond to the hull to begin with, and there was good glue squeezeout, but this assures a super bond and keeps water from hiding in any crevices I missed.
This week’s carpentry was tearing out all the temporary framing in the forward portion of the hull, a nasty job since a lot of glue had seeped in during planking, and some of the framing I glued in on purpose to assure a nice, fair curve all along the bow. I have a Fein Multimaster which allowed me to plunge a saw blade between the planking and frames in all the sticky places. Don’t know what I would have done before the Fein — hatchet and chisel?
Stringer fillet — two feet of about 150.
Forward berth area. Much bigger than I had imagined, tons of storage space.
The Tardis Project 
Really enjoying this and keep up the good work and posting. I was soo close to building this boat- i got plans for it and prepared the shop for it. I have built 8 boats and had picked this plan to be the next one. I decided not to build based on the 2500 hour estimated build time. I did however buy a 55 year old boat of similar size that needs mega- work. Not sure if that was a good decision or not.
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