Hull removed from form

Before we left for our world travels, Dawna and I popped the finished float hull half out of the forms.  It took a little motivating to get all of the seams to release from the tape, but with some patience working around the hull we were able to free it without any damage.  The tape worked well at preventing the glue from adhering to the form.

Here you can see the hull sitting on a couple of saw horses next to the form frame.  There was a lot of expanded urethane glue on the outer surface of the hull.  If you recall, we sanded the excess glue on the inside, but had problems with accidently gouging the foam.  We wanted to clean up the outer surface before moving on to the next half, but didn't want to remove any core material.  I tried a cheese grater type of plane and it worked like a charm.  You can see the hand plane sitting on the hull.  Dawna finished off the clean up with the hand planer in a couple of hours and it looks great.  The outer surface seems pretty nice, but after we looked closer, we noticed waves in the surface due to the scalloping of the planks.  The ends seem to be the worst.  So we will have to put some effort into fairing the surface once we put the hull halves together.  We will try some different techniques on the next half to improve the initial fairness.

Since we won't be working on this hull again until we complete the third half, we needed to get this half out of the way.  I didn't want to store it outside since I haven't sealed the outer surface yet.  So I decided to build a shelf to support the hull overhead.  Here you can see how it turned out.  Only took a couple hours to build the supports.  The hull is very light, so the 2x4s are more than adequate.  Of course, lifting a 24' long hull half over my head, walking it outside, rotating, walking back in, and placing it on top of the supports at 7 feet above the floor made it seem somewhat heavier.  Dawna was at her friends house, and I wanted to get going with the next half, so I was impatient and did it myself.  It would have been very easy with Dawna helping.  In any case, this worked out well and you can see the hull is out of the way.  I am debating whether to make another set of supports on the other side of the boat house to store the second half, or add a second layer to these supports.  Stay tuned to see the exciting conclusion of this conundrum.