PocketShip Build

I finished all the interior filleting. Then I sanded the fillets in the rearmost section and applied fiberglass cloth to it.

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This is a time-consuming step. First, I pulled out all the wires. Then I started applying nice rounded fillets of epoxy paste to all the joints. I am about 2/3 done, and it will probably take about 30 batches of epoxy (one patch mostly fills a 12-ounce plastic cup).

I also added a few cleats to the floors and bulkheads that I hadn’t glued in place before assembly.

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I have been applying epoxy to all the joints in the hull. When it cures, I can remove the wire stitches that were temporarily holding them together. It has taken three sessions of gluing to do this. The bow was tricky, because the joints are hard to reach, and the sharp bends in the plywood mean that the gluing has to be strong.

This is traditionally the beginning of the actual construction. We added a couple of coins for good luck, an old tradition. Then I attached the keelson on top of the keel.

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This went pretty smoothly, and I needed less lead than I expected.

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Before gluing the centerboard halves together, I routed rabbets on the inside sides of the leading and trailing edges, forming a groove that I later filled with epoxy.

I did one extra thing: I glassed the inside surfaces of the blocking between the centerboard trunk sides.  This means that the entire trunk inside surface is glassed.

I put a layer of glass on the inside surfaces of the trunk.  I also tried to have the glass wrap around the bottom edge, but this was not especially successful.

There are or course tons of parts. It took a while to remove all the CNC-cut plywood pieces, and to figure out where to put everything.

There was (and still is) a big pile of random plywood scraps to get rid of.

I drove down to Annapolis to pick up my kit and a few other items. Fortunately my Skerry’s boat trailer carried the kit just fine, so I did not have to rent a van or trailer.

Because of Coronavirus, I couldn’t visit CLC’s showroom or check out their Pocketship, which was sitting under a tarp on its trailer in the parking lot. So I was at CLC for only 20 minutes or so. I also did some shopping at Fawcett Boat Supplies and West Marine, a couple of miles down the road.

It tool a while to unpack everything when I got home.

We sewed up a mainsail and jib from Sailrite kits. We had previously made the sail for our Skerry, and it’s not nearly as hard as you might think, provided you have a good sewing machine.

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I’ll need a couple of hundred pounds of lead for the ballast. In the past, it was possible to get used tire weights from tire shops, but tire weights aren’t made of lead anymore. So I visited a scrap metal yard in Trenton and asked. They gladly sold me all they had, which was about 150 pounds – enough to get started.