Bulkhead out and Templates

Here is the bow of the boat without the bulkhead....roomy! I took the saggy remains and traced it onto some luan ply to make a new template. I also modified the shape to accomodate a fiberglass tube and some struts to the deck. It fits! While I was at the boat today, I also checked the NACA 64A010 profile against the keel...it fits perfectly!

Keel Dilemma

Well, I've been making some keel measurements and looking at the previous botched fairing job/s. It appears that the keel is attempting to be a NACA 64A-009 series foil...maybe a little thicker. This is based on making some measurements and plotting against known keel profiles in excel. I also used a neat shareware program called Profili that does some neat plotting and has a large library of standard profiles. The root of the keel (top 1/8) is clearly fatter than the rest and way out of profile...the rest is not half bad. In investiagting if the root could be thinned to match profile, I started drilling test holes down to the lead...yep, most can be thinned out.....then I found the interesting part. The fairing in the picture I had thought was just glass left over from removal of some of the chord. It is filled with foam core (Klegecell), the same stuff the rest of the boat is made of....I probed it and it appears to be the hull core and goes straight to the inner skin. Ow! now to figure out how to deal with that...

Pulpit Off

Took the bow pulpit off and the track on the forward deck. The bolts in the deck track were fused to the bolts, so I ended up shearing them all off. The deck under the pulpit is a disaster....yep, good thing I decided to fix this:

2006 Haul Out

Hauled the Lobster out today, bottom paint is still in good shape and it came out clean. Still have about the same number of blisters as when it went in...will take care of some more of them over the winter. Also, here is a photo of the forward bulkhead that's going to be replaced: