Coaming and Hatches

Now that the deck glass is on we turned our attention to the cockpit coaming. The coaming consists of 3 layers. The lower 2 layers are tacked in place with two nails with epoxy between each layer. Then the top layer is placed on the top with epoxy and clamped in place.

Now would probably be the appropriate time to Thank the many people who loaned us clamps for this project. Below are all of our clamps, along with clamps from friends J, Mimi and Bruce. We truly have learned you can not have too many clamps.

Now we move on to the hatches. Using a template we traced the location of the hatches and then using the bonzai saw Luke carefully cut out the hatches.

Voila!

Next we have to reinforce the hatch openings by attaching a second layer of plywood inside the openings. Once again...more clamps needed.

Then we prepared the hatch covers. Unlike Luke's boat, The Chesapeake uses separate pieces of wood for the hatch covers. Here you can see the hatch stiffeners are attached to the covers using fiberglass tape and epoxy. The stiffeners also help to give the hatch covers the right amount of curvature (along wiht the help of Bruce's hatch jigs, THANKS)