Time for a building break so I figure why not add a little more to the story?
I've come to the point where I have to look at set up, plumbing and all of the running gear going into the boat. My first task was to fabricate a doubler for the strut to pass through. Since I want a boat that will be legal to run anywhere, that and it would look tacky, I refused to mount the strut on the outside of the transom. I instead mounted the two "L" brackets to the bottom of the boat on top of a 1/8" ply doubler. A slot was cut into the bottom and a .21 sized .187 Aeromarine strut was then installed. Next, I machined a mirror image bracket for the Speedmaster .21 sized rudder assembly and installed it with machine screws and blind nuts. I next drilled a hole in the transom for the rudder pushrod, tobe installed later with the radio. Having everything else in the boat, I next drilled holes through most of the left side underdeck framing and transom for the installation of the cooling water supply tube. This was followed by a discharge tube through the left nontrip aft of the sponson transom. With all of this now in the boat, the last of the glue blocks were glued in and sanded to shape. The sponson sides were next added and, after the epoxy cured and the bottom edges sanded flush with the chines, the sponson bottoms were added. At this point, I again deviated from the instructions. The instructions say to add a running pad on the bottom of both sponsons, mounted along the edge next to the hull's tunnel. Since this boat is so radically different from the stock kit, I decided to forgo the runner until the boat shows it's needed. At this point, with everything that is under the deck installed except the fuel system, I installed any still needed glue blocks and sanded down the top of the frames and skin panels already on the boat to make the hull ready to accept the left side deck. Finding that I didn't need as much material for the sponson sheers, I used the Dremel tool again and removed almost all of the excess material. With the underdeck woodworking done, I now coated everything not previously coated with West Systems slow set epoxy. After the epoxy had cured, I test fit the kit deck on the hull. As I expected, it was considerably narrower than required so, using the kit's panel for a template, I traced out the edges of the deck onto a sheet of 1/16" ply and made the required corrections to fit the new hull. After cutting out the reworked deck, I used it as a template for a right side deck and then installed the left side deck. Since the reight side was already traced, I repeated teh sequence and installed the right side deck the next day. With the decks installed, the edges were sanded flush and the curve behind the sponson was finished, again based on the Newton Pak color sheet as I liked the curve from it better than the curve on the Dumas supplied deck panels