It's actually been a very mild summer this year and it's barely the end of August and the weather is turning Fall like. The next three days are promising significant rainfall.
At some point the boat build will be tarped over for the winter and progress will become dead slow. I'm pondering about what stage the build we be when this happens. I'm currently working the 'stitch-and-glue' step. Which will be followed by some deck framing. After that, the boat gets flipped upside down to do the all the steps which complete the hull. I had thought I might get to the boat flipping step before battening down for the winter, but now I'm rethinking that.
Upside down would make it easy to drape plastic over it, but if I leave it upright it leaves me access to the inside and there are numerous little parts I can work on in the basement workshop during the winter if I have access to measure and fit the parts on the interior.
Why does the build become dead-slow during the winter? After all, I have a covered work area and can further cover the boat in plastic. The reason is that Epoxy is a chemical reaction and in the winter it just becomes too cold for the curing process to happen well.
According to the MAS epoxy data sheet, the minimum temperature required is 55 degrees (F). Here's Portland's average temperatures. The "Epoxy Year" closes out around the last week of October.
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