Hi Everyone,

I'm just getting things ready while I'm (im)patiently waiting on the postman to arrive with the kit Bob (cargoman) sold to me (with our Dougs help), Bob and I had a good old natter on the phone beforehand, and I'm now in the hands of the post office, An post and HM/Irish customs as we are now "post"-brexit (hah - how apt is that😊).
So nothing of note to post just yet, I've got eze-kote ordered and that should arrive soon-certainly before I need it😊, once I've started the build I'll figure out what I need in running gear batteries etc once I see what space I have.
I will of course be using the 2 excellent build blogs of mistyoptic and seanympth as reference and guides.
I'm already thinking of ways to make this a wee bit different, although as a beginner I should really be building this straight out of the box - ach we'll see.
More soon hopefully.

Bill

Ah finally it's arrived, well actually it arrived a few days ago but I've been a wee bit busy so just got the first opportunity to have a look at the kit.
Overall I'm impressed with the kit, laser cut good quality ply on 3 sheets, window frames and other bits n bobs, no unnecessary fancy box or packaging to throw out, so far so good.
Unfortunately one of the sheets got damaged during transit, but nothing major, the break on one of the keel plates will be sandwiched between 2 reinforcing plates - so it's easily fixed and once glued up you'd never be any the wiser 😊.
I've removed all the main structural parts from their sheet and put the rest back in their bag in a safe place🤞, ready to start putting some bits together.
I've tried test fitting a few parts together and the fit is snug without being overtight.
So cleared the kitchen table of all the accumulated junk and got my A3 cutting mat out (yep been there - done that, ain't doing it again 😊) ready to make a start tomorrow.

Bill

At last, I've finally glued something together, I sanded the edges of the 2 forward bulkhead plates and using aliphalatic glue, stuck them to the main deck, I noticed that the bulkhead plates protrude through the deck a wee bit, so I cut up a sheet of balsa to use as spacers underneath.
One thing I didn't count on was the glue going off so quickly in the nozzle, on the second plate gave the bottle a squeeze-nothing, so gave it another slightly harder squeeze-nothing, after a few increasingly harder squeezes the wee congealed lump popped out the end of the nozzle followed by a fair amount of the glue I was looking for, unfortunately it landed just about everywhere apart from where I wanted it, but at least I had glue now 😊, lesson learned? nah probably not
I got a set of right angles from amazon which worked out better than I could have hoped, they fill the gap between the 2 bulkheads perfectly, they just needed a bit of extra weight to help them... so raided the cupboards as I'm working in the kitchen anyway 😊 and found a couple of suitable weights

After leaving things overnight to let the glue fully dry, I had another look to see why the bulkhead wouldn't sit fully home the night before, and found that I hadn't sanded the bottom of the tabs where they were connected to the sheet, it wasn't much... but it was enough, so I'll put that down to operator error (and laziness) lesson learned.

Day 2

I made sure not to repeat the mistake of the night before, and sanded all the edges to remove the charring from the laser cutting, parts fitted perfectly. So glued everything up and clamped the squares to the side pieces to make sure they were perfectly straight, I'll leave everything overnight again to let the glue dry.

After a minor setback where I managed to break off the stem, threw a tantrum a 3 year old in a supermarket would applaud and say "now that's how it should be done", I went in the huff with my partly built boat.

I was still using my welding magnets to line everything up, and they were working pretty well albeit a little heavy for the task, when the doorbell rang, surprised I spun round with the boat in my hands-unfortunately due to the laws of physics the magnets wanted to stay where they were and snap the stem parted company with the rest of the craft, who was at the door - a salesman ... during a pandemic !!, as politely as I could muster I simply said "no thank you" and closed the door while he was in full flow. Several weeks later I finally got back to it, mixed up some epoxy and lined it up as best I could, I think it's straight and in line 😊, after pondering for so long it took all of 5-10 mins to fix, so I'll leave it overnight to allow the epoxy to fully cure and I'll see how we got on tomorrow.

Unfortunately I put my camera down in a safe place - away from the epoxy - and now I can't find it, should turn up soon and I'll post the photos then.

P.S. finally getting the vaccine tomorrow.

Take care all

Bill