Technical Notes on the Leeboards:
I chose to replace the Martha Jane leeboards with the ones from Phil Bolger's Wish II design, found in his book, 30 Odd Boats. My brother David used these on his Zoon, and we figured out that the area is the same for the two designs. The difference is a sportier look to the Wish II leeboards, and they take half the plywood to build. I notice that Mr. Bolger's modifications to the Martha Jane plan includes a change in the leeboard shape to something a little closer to Wish II.
I routed the edges of the weight holes so that when the two pieces of ply were glued together, and the lead was poured, there would be a ridge of lead inside the board all the way around. I drove large nails into the edges of the hole so that the heads stuck out into the gap. These became embedded in the lead when it hardened.
I poured the lead with the help of my friend, Bruce. The day we did it was pretty cold, with a high in the mid-20s. I think that's why the lead took a long time to melt. The lead came in 60-pound pigs, so we hacked one in half with a rock hammer and a sledge ax, then weighed the chunks on the bathroom scale. After screwing a plywood base lined with aluminum foil under each weight hole, we set the leeboards outside and leveled them. We lined a box with aluminum foil, put an electric hotplate inside, and built a foil tent to put over the top. We then set it up in the driveway, turned it on, put one board's worth of lead in the pot, and went away to drink coffee, peer nervously out the window from time to time, and fret over whether or not it would work.
When the lead finally melted, we poured it into the hole and let it harden. It singed the wood a bit around the edges, but that hasn't been a problem. I filled the few cracks between the lead and the wood with thickened epoxy, and overlaid each slab of lead with more epoxy. The coats of epoxy to seal the boards further covered the lead. I applied multiple coats of paint, and the leeboards are now stored in a location ideally suited for paint curing (behind the couch in the living room. Hey, it's a home-built boat—we do what we can!).