Mounting the Frames Part III

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Exciting day today.

I continued fixing up the inconsistencies in the frames and fairly quickly got to a stage where I trusted a dry fit of the girder.

Along the way I needed to adjust a couple of frames a couple of mm to the side, this being tricky with the block pattern I had I came up with a fairly neat solution that allowed side to side adjustment. This photo shows the screws used to adjust the offset, on the other side I added spacers behind the vertical.


This was added to three frames and it was time for a dry fit. About 30 seconds in I hit my next snag. The plans called for a half in space on the #4 frame which I'd assumed allowed for the CB doubler. It's possible that actually the CB doubler was meant to stop prior to the bolt (and only bolt through the ply skins). Even with hindsight it was a bit tricky to tell.


Anyway, cutting the frame doublers back a bit extra allowed them to clear the bolts. 


Blimey it suddenly looks a bit like a boat!

Still not quite fitting. The transom wasn't matching up.



Some measuring and I found I'd placed it too far aft (thickness of one ply sheet, suspicious but also easily fixed) and it was just too low, also by the width of a ply sheet. Fixing that and it was still out. So was frame #3, minutely. After some wiggling and pushing and humming and harring I traced it back to some sealer buildup preventing frame #4 settling properly.

With that fixed it fit pretty snuggly!


And because I'm feeling happy I'll just throw in an extra gratuitous side shot!


Not going to glue until the weekend. Tomorrow I'm going to add a little wire bracing that can straighten out a spot in the girder. It's only out by about 1mm but seems easy to fix best done before any fairing and will be nicely held in place by the time I flip the boat over.

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