This weekend I did a lot of painting. Over the last few weeks though I've made lots of progress in various areas as described below.

Rudder

To resolve the rudder issues I looked at this Halman sitting at Lakeside Marina near Guntersville. I examined how the rudder swung and how it balanced.

I talked to the designer about the rudder problems. He pointed out that what I did on 7-14-4 to trim the rudder to the profile of the stern was incorrect. The rudder really needs to follow the offsets specified on the plans. The next question was whether I should scrap the existing rudder and start over. To decide this I made a plywood template cut to the plan offsets. Here I am trial fitting the template to figure out how it should go in relation to the stern to accommodate the hardware.

Here I've superimposed the template on the existing rudder. It turns out that it can be made to work with the rudder post about 1/2" aft of where it's supposed to be. Otherwise it is within 1/4" of agreement. I decided to live with this and move on.

I also emailed a picture of the positioning of the hardware to the designer. He said that the stock needs to run tangent to the stern profile at a higher point than I had initially placed it. Here I've repositioned some of the pieces and fixed it up about as best as I can.

Here I'm drilling the hole for the cotter pin. It holds the nut in place once it's screwed down.

I took the pieces to a place in Huntsville named "It's Not Paint". They galvanized and powdercoated the steel parts so that they won't rust. It was good luck to get the color to exactly match the Hattaras Offwhite that I used on the boat. Now the parts await final assembly.

Here is a patch job on the rudder in progress. I plugged holes with thickened epoxy and let cure.

Toerails

The toerails are finally done.

Here I've left a gap of just more than 1" to allow water to run off the deck.

Waterline

Here is a view of the waterline. I chose Malachy Green. This will be the theme color of the boat. I will have to make any canvas I uses this color.

Inside

I turn my attention to the inside of the boat. I will be epoxy coating everything, sanding the strip planking on the inside and clear coating it. Here I've started cutting out the remaining part of the #2 bulkhead. This is as shown in the plans.

Here it is done. It makes the inside seem about twice as big as before.

Here's the finished cutout for bulkhead #2. This allows more room in the bunk. I've already started painting the inside.