Well it's April, and the plan has gone to hell in a handcart over the last 3 months - mainly due to the cold, but partially to some CBA attitude and a few weekends on the raz. Could be worse:-)

 

Anyway, the entire bottom of the hull has now beed graphite coated to a sufficiently smooth degree, so it's on with the fitting of the rudder, then re-attaching the bilge runners.

 

Drilliing a pilot hole for the rudder allowed a plumb line approach to mark out the hole centres required in the mounting blocks:

 

 

 

 

 

This gave the fore-aft dimension, with the athwartships position being a centreline on the mounting block. As we need 7 thicknesses across the two mounting block, it seemed wise to set up a drilling jig:

 

 

 

with the 1 3/4" holes matching the oilite sintered phosphor bronze bushes I sourced to suit the 1 1/4" shaft

 

 

 

I also intend to use both a tube and an oil seal inboard of the first bush to guard against water ingress - this was an easier way for me than to arrange for suitably machined nylon bushes which I can't seem to find off-the-shelf.

 

 

 

The lower mounting block will eventually be mounted in epoxy, and will surround the exposed through-hull bush shown above.

 

The rudder is fashioned from 18mm marine ply, and fits into the 12mm slot in the rudder shaft, so the forward section had to be machined down on the router bed to fit.

 

Also, as can be seen from the next pic, the keel was routed down to allow fitment of a further 10mm oak strip through which I've bored a locating hole for the lower end of the rudder shaft.

 

 

 

The keel shoe will eventually be shaped to a rad about 1/2" outside the rudder shaft

 

After a weekend in Startford where wifey posted another marathon PB, I managed to get a few hours in during the week and got the bilge & keel runners bonded into place:

 

 

 

and decided to get around the slight flat on the bottom by allowing the bilge runners to find a fair curve, then back-filling any gaps to the hull:

 

 

 

So by end April, having sanded, faired, rolled on another coat of graphite-epoxy, and scotch-brited the whole surface to expose some graphite as antifoul, I got as far as being ready to roll over again:

 

 

 

The surface in this pic doesn't look as good as it does in the flesh, and while it's not top-coat standard, I believe it will be perfectly smooth enough for the bottom of this particular vessel - it certainly feels slippery enough to glide throught the Thames