Hull No.1 and the "Sniper" deck plug

Hull No.1 has been recently laid up, the hull bottom was gel-coated white, while the hull sides were gel-coated "Athol Blue" which is the lightest blue in the Allnex Colour Range.

The tie layer was then added onto the cured gelcoat, using vinylester resin and 225 CSM, during this process we added rovings to the internal radius's of the strakes and chines to reduce the chance of air voids and to create a strong point on the vulnerable areas of the hull. The idea behind using a light weight tie layer is to reduce the amount of shrinkage in the initial laminate which reduces the "print through" of the fibreglass fibres as the resin shrinks during the curing process, this was then cured overnight.

The next layers were a 450 CSM over the entire hull and transom, with the strakes and chine getting a strip of 450 Double Bias, and the transom getting a full cover of 450 DB with 200mm laps onto hull sides and bottom, then another full cover of 450 CSM. This was left overnight again, then repeated the next day.

The 38mm Thermolite transom was then glued in, as was the forward towing eyelet block, which is a solid fibreglass mass. Once cured, the prior hull laminate was repeated another 2 times. Then 12mm thick 80kg foam was glued to the hull sides, cured, then another 2 layers of 450 CSM over the entire hull.

The hull was left to cure for a few weeks in the mold over the Christmas break, then we started on the stringer and sub-floor structure, firstly with the main stringers made from 38mm Thermolite and the outer 2 stringers made from 12mm Thermolite all glued and glassed into place with a 2400 gram combination of DB and CSM.

Sub floor bulkheads were added, spaced at 600mm intervals, glassed in with 2 layers of 450 CSM. All laminates cleaned up, then onto fitting and glassing the floors, keel stringer, flow-coating the flooding keel void and fitting and glassing the keel floor.

All this structural work has now created a stable hull that cant flex or move, so now it was time to release from the mold, fit a light weight version of our Tracker deck to the hull, which now gives us a base to build our Sniper deck from. The process from here was to use MDF to make a skeleton of the new fore deck, firstly starting with a "spine" to create the sheer line, then add "ribs" and shape those to a desirable camber, dash and breaker rebate was also made at this stage. The gaps in the ribs were the filled with expanding foam, glassed, then bogged, faired, bogged, faired..... TBC