Quote:
Dave must be very skinny to be able to get under there 
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But not skinny enough to do what came next.
I need to build a deck for the water tank to sit on. The deck I removed had no support underneath other than the floatation foam. I wanted to do something that would both support the tank deck and stiffen the hull. So I took some 4” extruded foam I got from a friend:
got out my ACME hot wire foam cutter…
…and after a little sanding to round off the corners, I had foam cores for my stringer/ deck supports.
It was at about this point, after considerable puzzling over how I was going to get under there to laminate the new stringers, that I decided to cut another hole in the deck. Given the amount of cussing involved in getting those stringers laminated, I’m pretty sure the effort would have failed completely if I’d tried to do it from underneath the cabin sole.
I put in a new partial bulkhead between the fuel tank compartment and the water tank compartment and then glued in the stringer cores with thickened epoxy and laminated and tabbed them with three layers of 2408. I still have to clean up the limber holes and a few rough spots on the tabbing, but all in all, I think it turned out ok. While I was at it, I reinforced the tabbing on the starboard stringer with three layers of 1808.
The hole I cut in the deck:
The forward hole will get a hatch like strick's. The larger hole will get closed back up. The balsa core is in good shape, so I'm just going to laminate the piece I cut out back in place once I'm done with the work below decks.
Well that pretty much brings us up to date. And I finished my Christmas shopping.
Merry Christmas,
Dave