Shearwater 17 bulkhead gaps

i am building a Shearwater 17 from the kit. I am fitting the deck to the hull and I am not pleased with the gap between the forward bulkhead and the deck. I know that most people say to just fill in the gap. I am considering shaving down the outer deck seams to help the deck conform to the bulkhead shape.  What are your thoughts on this method?

 


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RE: Shearwater 17 bulkhead gaps

I added the temporary scrap of wood to see how well the curvatures would match.  

RE: Shearwater 17 bulkhead gaps

  My SW17 front bulkhead fit a bit tighter, but I just continued and filled the gaps when I filleted the bulkheads. I think it was the aft one on my yak with a gap. Of course, now no one knows and I can not even remember which bulkhead had the gap.

When you say trim the "outer seams" do you mean the hull-deck seam? Trimming there is still going to leave gaps as the angle of the deck sides will be different than the bulkhead. To me it sounds complicated and has the risk of you trimming too much. Then you will be filling a gap that shows! This gap is an issue only you will know, and is actually giving you a slightly higher deck - more foot room (by what looks to be a whopping 5mm). Again, I would just fill the gap with thickened epoxy and keep going. Once fillet even you will not be able to tell. But of course, it is your yacht and you should build to your standards.

Joel

 

 

RE: Shearwater 17 bulkhead gaps

i agree with joe....i would just fillet in the gap on top of the bulkhead and not attempt to shave the deck seams to get it to fit.  and joe is right...nobody will know.

i recently built a Shearwater 17 and had some gap filling to deal with as well.   eyeballing your picture (thanks for attaching), its not that big a gap.   any attempt to cut back the shear is something that has to involve the whole length of the shear on both sides....or its not going to fit right....i just would not go there.

for me, the approach i took for filling the gap was to duct tape starting from the hatch side of the bulkhead ...i reached in with duct tape putting half the duct tape on the bulkhead/half on the underside of the deck to seal the gap.  i then came in from the cockpit side and created a nice fillet with mayonaise/peanut butter consistency woodflour epoxy.  once that set, i removed the duct tape (the epoxy wont stick to it), and then filleted the other side.  looked great and you would have never known there was a gap.

h

 

RE: Shearwater 17 bulkhead gaps

I had a similar problem on a Chesapeake I built.  What I did was tape one side the seam and wet out the tape.  Then a coupele of hours later after the epoxy kicked I came back and used the dam created by the fiberglass tape to fill the gap with a fillet of epoxy thickend with wood flour, then I laid another piece of tape on top of the fillet and wet it out.  You cannot tell there was ever a gap there.

Making a dam out of tape first will make it much easier to bridge that gap with thickened epoxy and you will use a lot less thickened epoxy and using less epoxy = a lighter boat! 

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