Monat: November 2025

Finally glued the first piece of the deck in place!
The first piece, the small triangle at the front, was quite easy.
The next piece was much more difficult. How do you get such a large piece into exactly the right place on the first attempt without smearing all the resin?
I screwed two hooks into the ceiling and lifted the piece into place using strings.

Then I started gluing: first, I coated all the gluing points with resin. Then I applied the thickened epoxy to the frames and stringers.

After that, I slowly lowered the panel using the strings. I fixed the position with two screws on the front edge before shaping the panel with weights.

Now all I had to do was screw everything together securely.

This is what it looks like inside the front compartment now. The unpainted section will be cut out later to install the hatch.

It was a great weekend!
Three other boat builders came to visit me so that we could cast the lead bulbs for our boats together.
First up was Fabian (#208), who built two beautiful moulds.

We were able to borrow the casting equipment from Thomas (#66), who has already finished his lead bomb. Many thanks to him, it worked perfectly!

We were fortunate in obtaining the lead: the company on whose premises my workshop is located had manufactured a batch of lead casings for X-ray machines and saved the milling chips for us.

It took us almost an hour to melt the lead and bring it to the right temperature.
We cast two bulbs one after the other and then waited four hours until they were cold enough to remove them from the mould.

At first, we were afraid that we wouldn’t be able to get the bulbs out of the mould. But the lead shrank as it cooled, and soon we could see a gap between the mould and the lead.

The result of the first two runs.

And these are the four of us boat builders: Oliver (#273), Fabian (#208), me (#165) and Dominique (#220).