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With the hull glassed, skeg added and the bottom coated with HydroCoat antifouling paint it was time to roll it. I had given the process a good bit of thought. It was going to be a little more complicated because I could not just lift one side and allow it to flip over. My shop did not afford the width to allow it to happen. Instead, it needed to be rotated in place by dropping one side to the floor and dragging it across while raising the other. I had several friends that had volunteered to help but when the day came I decided to do it solo. I just felt being able to take my time and think my way through it would be better without the distraction of the helpers.
I first built a "roll over" structure around the hull to cushion the hull and provide hard-points for floor contact. I then removed some ceiling tile and bolted two fabricated rollers to the rafters. These would allow the nylon straps to shift without binding. I bolted two pieces of 1/2" x 4" x 4" angle iron to the floor on one side of the hull. I also had cut hole in one side of the pieces of angle to accept the hook of the chain wenches I had borrowed. I had two cable wenches that were to be used to drag the hull across the floor. With all this in place it was time to start cranking wenches.
The first step was to pickup one side just enough to allow part of the building structure to be removed. Then I lowered it to the floor.
With one side sitting on the floor the lifting straps were moved to the other side. The hull was then raised to allow complete removal of the building fixture. The cable wenches were attached to pull it across the floor.
As you would expect, going past center had a high pucker factor. As it did the bow slid to the left about three feet stopping about 2 inches from my dust collection system. In this photo I had already pulled it back into posistion.
Continuing to lower. On the down hill side now.
And here she is blocked and level. From start to finish it took about 3 hours.
The first view of the interior made me smile. Can't tell you how many times I had crawled under it with a flash light to clean away glue squeeze out. But now it was all worth it as it looked very neat and clean.
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