I'm pretty much done with major carpentry on this project. I do still have to make the seats to cover the seat boxes but all else is done. Today I started to fit the hatches after finishing the hatch coamings. When I went to attach the hatches to the hatch hinge I discovered that I'd gotten the wrong fasteners. I also had a major scare, a batch of epoxy that took long enough to kick that I thought I'd mixed my first bad batch. I put the heat to it and it kick pretty much right away -whew! It reminded me how long it took for things to cure through the cold months and the return to cold temps here (fifties) have slowed down the speed of epoxy reactions.

The big task of the day was dry assembling the cockpit. It's pretty much perfectly square. Out one millimeter on the diagonals. I've added 1 inch thick stringers on two foot centers with rigid foam in between these.The foam will go almost to within three inches of the edge of the cockpit where the stringers begin to taper to zero under the seat boxes. I got a couple of sheets of 4mm okume which I'll sheath the bottom of the cockpit with.


Seat boxes fitted to cockpit. The bottoms of the seat boxes over lap the cockpit by three inches and share a wall.


Stringers are notched 6mm to fit over the bottom of the seat box bottoms.


1 inch of rigid foam fitted between the stringers.