Like building a bottle in a ship ...

Dawna and I spent some time today taping the bulkheads to the third half.  Recall we already taped the bulkheads to the second half (upper half) while it was still in the frame.  Now we had to do all the same steps working through small holes in the deck of the float.  This included forming perfect fillets of putty, which was somewhat frustrating when everything was wide open.  I did start the day by cutting the lower half of each opening and removing some of the frame stringers to give us better access.

This is a view looking in from the stern at the aft bulkhead.  You can see the access hole that Dawna is working through.  Generally the options are 1) look through the hole at what you are working on, or 2) put your hand through the hole and do something, but you can't really do both things at the same time.  We did use mirrors to view the tape work on the gunwale and deck (seam along the same side as the hole).  But once you stick your hand in to do something, your arm tends to block the view.

At least the forward side of the shroud bulkhead and the aft side of the forward bulkhead are accessible through the large hatch.  Here Dawna is working on taping the shroud bulkhead.  Catherine was wondering if this is her room.

Even after a hard day of work, Dawna makes Tyvek look sexy!  I know I'm pretty excited.  Grrr, epoxy ...  By the end of the day, we completed 1.5 bulkheads out of a total of three.  We didn't start until the afternoon, so it wasn't as bad as it sounds, but it is certainly slower than working in an open hull.  We will probably finish this task next Friday, as well as taping the inside deck seam.  Then we will be ready to pull it out of the frame for finish work.

In this view of the shroud bulkhead, you can see the nice fillet and tape job.  The filleting started out a serious problem, but then we tried using a 4" long piece of 1-1/4" pvc pipe as the forming tool.  By keeping the length of the pipe at a slight angle to the seam, the pipe surface squeezed the excess putty into the seam and left a perfect fillet.  It only took a couple passes to fill all of the seam.  Then we just cleaned up the extra putty the tool pushed out of the way, and voila, a perfect fillet working through a small hole.  We were very excited about this discovery, truly the holy grail of filleting tools.  I just wish we tried it earlier.