Here are links to other steps of the Puddle Duck Build

• Part One, What's a Puddle Duck? and I get Started
• My Puddle Duck Racer goes 3D It's official, I get my hull number.
• Next, I add flotation compartment.
• Bottom gets fiberglassed and Gunnels are added.
• Daggerboard case and seat get made.
• Making the daggerboard.
• Adding weight to the daggerboard
• Making the kick up rudder along with a tiller.
• I made a wooden sprit
• Finishing the carbon fibre mast I made a few years ago.
• Replaced the Broken Carbon Fibre mast with a wooden one.
• My PDR gets a mast step, plus side and front decks and more glass
• Finally Finishing the hull
• The Duck gets some hardware
• I make a Sail for the Puddle Duck
• My Puddle Duck Gets Launched!!

Adding weight to the daggerboard

The daggerboard is too light and will float up unless I add some weight. I checked it in the pool and it floated high in the water.

I weighed the daggerboard and did fancy calculations to figure out how much weight to add. In the end it occured to me that I could just put the daggerboard in the water and tie on some weights till it was deep enough. The weights came to 2 large hinges and a few washers!

Routing and filling the daggerboard

Many people melt lead into a cavity in the daggerboard but I don't have lead and I don't like working with it. I have lots of bits of semi scrap and would love to get rid of some of it.

After tracing the hinges and making sure the board was thick enough I set up the router. There is a layer of fiberglass to cut through as well as a couple of layers of epoxy.

After routing out a cavity I put a layer of fiberglass on the bottom, put some thickened up epoxy over that and pushed the hinges and washers into the goop. I had coated them with liquid epoxy.

I put some more goop on top and used a spatula to even out the surface.

After filling the cavity, I put a layer of wetted fiberglass over the goop and I added a sheet of wax paper on top and put a piece of plywood with a weight on top of everything. This should give me a flat smooth surface. That section of the daggerboard is flat so I won't have to do any shaping of the weighted area.

I added a couple layers of epoxy with microspheres to fair the surface and added a layer of epoxy over the daggerboard. It's ready now for final fairing and painting.

It sounds like I'm adding buckets of epoxy but the whole process did not use up more than a regular plastic glass of resin/hardener. Most of the bulk was filler and weights.

emails: Christine

This web site reflects my personal ideas and doesn't represent anyone else's point of view.