My Friend G10

I love craftsmanship and seeing projects that have out lived their creators. For me, there is nothing better than walking around a building that is a few hundred years old or picking up a well made tool who's original owner is long gone.

When I was working on my Pearson 26 project and it was time to make backing plates I had many conversations with people and read about materials that are commonly used. Stainless steal, aluminum; wood; the dreaded plywood; and, not so common but making appearances here and there,  G10.

After weighing the pros and cons of all these materials I decided to go with the longest lasting and unfortunately the least environmentally friendly option - G10. It can't rust, it doesn't 'rot', and it's strong as hell.

My hope, that the sum of taking care to do a solid job on this boat, is that this will be a project that lasts many years. That someone someday can enjoy the fruits of my labor and with a little elbow grease - go sailing.

When Hutchins originally put this boat together they used some crappy wood here and there for backing plates or nothing at all. The results were loose hardware and crazing all over many Com Pac 16s that I read about and seen.

Why? I'm not sure, but I was disappointed in their decision to do this.

I started from the front of the boat and worked my way back making G10 backing plates for every piece of hardware on the boat.

Below are pictures illustrating the making of the bow eye plate. Behind the plate was filled with thickened epoxy. I followed this process to complete the rest of the plates.

 

Multitasking

There were a ton of projects to bang out and my mind was racing with ideas. When this happens I'm prone to rush jobs and make mistakes. I really had to limit my coffee intake and obey work lists like religion. 'Haste makes waste,' my mother reminded me as I was running around the garage like headless chicken.

Project 1: Cut new interior wood.

    

I hate plywood, so there was no way I was going to use it. I'd happily do the project two more time to avoid using the stuff. Real wood, CPES, and coats of epoxy sounds like a much better option for some reason that I would love to explain if you ever catch me at a party.

I decided to use local kiln dried Atlantic White Cedar for most of the wood in the boat. I love the wood, the smell, and its working quality.

Project 2: Crazing

There were cracks, holes, dings, and crazing all over the deck so grinding, sanding, filling, and sanding needed to happen before I was going to paint.


Project 3: More trailer love

Now that the boat has all that lead in it, new rollers only made sense. Out with the old..

Ballast

It was time to decide what to do about the lead ballast situation. Part of me wanted to play it safe and conservative and go with 200 pounds of lead and 200 of cement. The other part of me wanted to throw caution to the wind and go a full 300 pounds of lead and 150 of cement.

I ultimately decided to take a risk a do the latter. Creating a stiffer and more stable boat had major appeal. Not having any CP 16 sailing experience didn't help me in making the decision. What did help me was knowing that I had a whole bunch of lead and a curiosity to see what lowering the center of buoyancy that much would do.

Three hundred pounds of lead is heavy! It took very few brain cells to decide that I should reinforce the keel area with more glass. I layered up a couple of sheets of heavy glass mat and epoxy. In the end I felt a lot more confident about dropping all of that lead in there.

Next was to figure out how to lay the lead in in a balanced way. After some reading and thinking I decided to favor the weight a bit forward. It was a good workout moving the stuff back and forth...like I said, lead is heavy.

I finally decided, pulled the trigger, and poured the cement...no going back now!!!

It's really great coming from a place of projects. My dad is a big tinkerer and always has a few project irons in the fire. Currently he is building a little barn in our backyard and lucky for me he was pouring concrete into Sonotubes and had all the equipment out that I needed. Nice.