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December 2022: setbacks and sickness

Afbeelding
After glassing the hull in November, we planned to flip the boat before the 1st of January 2023. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out as planned…  In the days after we finished glassing, we noticed that on two areas on the hull the epoxy did not dry as expected. At first, we thought that this was probably due to the cold weather and so we thought that the problem would probably fix itself in the next couple of days. Of course, this was just wishful thinking since we used winter-epoxy and temperatures in the shed were above minimum requirements. So, after a couple of days, we had to conclude that something went wrong. In retrospect, we think there was one portion (about 1 kilo) of epoxy in which, instead of winter-hardener, we put epoxy from another small container. We were pretty bummed about it, since the glassing went so well! There was no other option than removing all of the wet glass, sanding the hull down to the hardened parts and applying two new layers of 600gr/m2 glass fiber on

November 2022: Gluin' and Glassin'

Afbeelding
After dry fitting de panels, we removed all of the panels from the hull. Taking the boat apart after closing the hull felt more like a step back rather than forward, but of course this was necessary in order to glue the panels. First, we applied two layers of epoxy on the inward facing side of the panels. After sanding and cleaning, we glued and screwed to panels back on.  Next step was gluing the second bottom layer on top (or bottom actually) after which we beveled this layer. After we finished beveling the edged, we were quite glad that for now planing is done for a while… We then mounted the butt blocks and sanded the hull. We rounded the sharp edges of the hull, so that applying the glass fiber without air trapping would be easier. Last step before we could start glassing the hull, was to mount the stem cap and shape the rounding of the bow. It was really nice to see the definitive hull shape after this step! So, glassing the hull then! We both never worked with glass fiber before

October 2022: dry fitting the panels means a lot of planing

Afbeelding
October started with dry fitting the panels on the stringers. We started off with panel 3, followed by 2 and 1 on both sides. We then beveled these panels after which we mounted panels 10 and 9 on both sides. We found ourselves being a bit frightened dry fitting the number 8 panels, but after some procrastinating behavior we also mounted these.  The number 8 panels were indeed quite the challenge. Due to the significant bending and twisting of this panel it was hard to determine how to attach them. We sawed off a piece of the starboard panel, which in the end was not necessary. Luckily the panel still fitted on all three stringers for the whole length of the panel. Ironically, we mounted the unmodified portside panel in a fraction of the time of the starboard panel and without much problems.  With all the starboard and portside panels mounted, a new round of beveling began in order to fit the bottom panels. Planing everything by hand was a tough workout, but seeing the beveled stringer

September 2022: it’s stringer time!

Afbeelding
After a nice and long summer holiday in which we sailed the seas of Croatia with our kids, we were fully reloaded and ready to continue building our boat. At this moment we had mounted the frames, including the stem, on the jig and we had put the keel timbers and bunksides into place. The meant we were ready for the stringers!  The stringers were temporarily stored in our home office in the garden. So, after months of seeing them during working hours and imagining how they would look on the boat, it was finally time to actually see how they would fit! Since the stringers were longer than our garage and we could therefore only work with the garage door opened, we had to finish the mounting (and with that the shortening of them) of every stringer we started with before calling it the day. We were quite surprised by how relatively easy the stringed bended around the frames from the back until frame D. Mounting the final part of the stringers on frame E and the stem proved to be more chal

July 2022: Building the jig and setting up the frames

Afbeelding
We were still in doubt where to set up the jig and construct the actual boat. We have a garage attached to our house, but with a length of just above 6 meters and a door width just under 3 meters it is not that specious for building a Class Globe 5.80. In addition, in order to fully use this 6 x 3m, we would have had to remove a radiator, storage cabinet and rearrange the racks inside the garage. On the other hand, if we were able to build it in our garage, we could just go and continue building the boat at every spare moment.  After measuring the garage again and thinking out other options (e.g. building the boat inside a tent in the garden), we decided that the garage would be the best place for building our Class Globe. We decided to put the jig on wheels so we could move it around a bit in the limited space and, not totally unimportant, to get the boat out of the garage once it is finished.   We had to be quite inventive for setting up the supports for the S-frame in the correct an

April 2021: Building kit delivered, let’s build the frames!

Afbeelding
On April 9th a big lorry pulled up in our driveway, did someone order a building kit?  Laying at the end of the drive way, nice and stacked, it did not look like a whole lot. Once we sorted everything out and put it in our garage it looked totally different: Wood… Everywhere…  Luckily spring just started and with the nice and sunny weather ahead, we constructed most of the frames outside in our garden. As suggested by other builders, we started off with frame E, followed by frame A and the transom. These frames we pretty straight forwards with limited room for error, since these frames could be fitted in just one way.  Frame B, C and D were more challenging in getting all the measurements right.  When we looked closer to our assembled (and glued…) B frame, we noticed that is was asymmetrical. We checked it again, and something went wrong indeed. Since we really did not want to see troubles mounting the stringers, there was no other option that to carefully chiseling the wrong parts out