Fillets for Hand Grips and Seat Back

Since the grab tube is round and the surfaces to which it attaches are all flat, the strength of the bond would be increased significantly if the bonding area was more than the two tangents or the seat back and deck. Of course, the sides where the tube exits the seat back are also fair game for cloth and resin, but this is fairly small contact area as well.

In addition, given the forces applied to the seat back and the grip tubes it would be good to spread them over a larger area. Hence the need to fillet the tube.

Since I am not planning to use the internal foam bulkhead for the seat back that I made a couple of months ago, and since it was the perfect width for the interior of the seat back, I decided to cut pieces of it to make fillets between the seat back and fore side of the tube and deck, the aft side of the tube and deck, and the upper fore side of the tube and the seat back.



I'm planning to fill the gaps at either side of the seat back with epoxy fillet material so that the blue foam will remain sight unseen. The epoxy fillet will be used to fill the other gaps between the seat back and deck, too, though a couple of short pieces of triangular wood fillet like that around the torque box will be used to fillet the outside bottom edge of the aft side of the seat back.


The grab tube was cut to a length of 21.5 inches. This will leave 5 inches exposed on either side of the seat. The remaining 6 inches or so will be used for both the rudder bearings and for insertion limit rings for the akas.

Anyway, it looks like the boat won't quite be done in time for this weekend's race at Lake Whatcom. The amount of work remaining is more than can be done in my evening hours if I also want to get a good night's rest! The forecast is for rain, which means that the Escapade with its bimini roof and semi-enclosed cockpit would be better for race photography.

It would also be good to have some sea trials before racing to make sure things work as planned, so I'm shooting for the Commencement Bay Race towards the end of the month for its racing debut.