At last, chain plates gussets are in

There are two steps of the building that are taking me forever to do. One are the chain plates gussets. The other is the keel box. They are both very important in the construction process and demand attention.

I hope to finish both until Sunday because I will be off work until then due to the celebration of the end of the Ramazan (a fast held from sunrise to sunset during one full month) here in Turkey.


So today I worked on the cp gussets. I actually started out a couple of weeks ago but stopped because I still had to figure out hundreds of details on the rig I intend to put on my boat. I got that figured all out thanks to Josh Shazza and Andrew TTB. I really owe them big time, they were incredibly patient with me and answered all of my questions with great care. You guys really rock !

So now I know for a fact my rig will be alu just like the Aussi boys and my chain plates will be at 22,5 degrees. Once I got that figured out, it was just a matter of getting the gussets at the right angle.

I had previously use strings to calculate the angle but this time I used the method than Ben has described me and it also worked a treat.

I first build a simple jig with two long segments at 90 degrees. I leveled it and fixed it in between frames 53,5 and 89. The long leg of the jig follows the boat center line.




I dropped a plumb from the top of 89 and drilled a hole on the jig so the plumb would come all the way down to the hull bottom. That plumb is exactly where the center of the compression mast will be. That set, I knew my jig was right on stop.



On the jig, I had previously drawn different angle lines just to have some references of what other angles might look like (45 degrees, 30 degrees) but of course what I was interested in was the 22,5degrees one.




I just streched a thin nylon rope from the jig to the sheer clamp to give the exact position of the gussets.

You can see on the picture below the gusset temporarily placed right underneath the string running at 22,5 degrees. I did the same on the other side and then measured everything from the bow to make sure it was symetrical.


Then I held the gusset in place with a scrap piece of ply that was lying flat between F 53,5 and 89 on the side. It is an easy way out to hold that heavy 1 inch thick gusset where it should be.



Then i used West 5mns epoxy with silica on a few spots to fix the gussets in place. This works wonders to fix difficult parts before you actually fillet or tape them.

Once that was dried, I removed the scrap ply from above and layed a thick filet of silica / epoxi putty, applied a layer of fiberglass, another of carbon and a final of fiberglass to finish it off.

As you can see on this picture, my gussets are not fixed at the f89 /hull sides junction because I am using a smaller angle of 22,5 degrees. A lot of builders are going with the C-tech rig option and therefore setting their gussets at 26 degrees which falls right at that 89 / hull side intersection.

Whatever you do, just make sure you set your gussets at an angle that will be coherent with your spreaders and the rest of your rig and that is exactly what took me a while to figure out.