9-29.

Sanding down all the epoxy mess.  I am the abominable sander - I'm super good at gouging out the plywood above or below where I'm actually supposed to be sanding.  I wish they made a petite sander to go with the petite drill we bought for this project.  This belt sander is massive and weighs a ton!
 

Sanding on top of the boat is fun and scary.  The sander wants to pull me right off the edge when it starts.  Now we have a nice clean-looking hull, just the bow remains to be worked on.  And there are lots of imperfections left to fix from my terrific handling of the sander.  Then we can slap the fiberglass on. 

9-27.

Avast there she'll float - a hull! 

Gooping on the glue.  Of course we ran out of 406 silica after starting to glue, so we had to switch to 405 (the chocolaty icing) which is supposed to be for filleting (see the white vertical line of epoxy running the length of the spine where the frame and spine meet - that's a fillet).  There's no stopping once you've gotten started, and you have to work fast before the glue dries - tonight we were finishing clean-up and filling in countersunk screw holes with really really viscous epoxy.  When the port bow chine panel springs a leak we can blame it on the 405 silica.
 

Tonight was a bittersweet evening.  These are the last views we'll have of the innards of the boat from this angle.   

 From here on out she'll look like a Boat!

So as you may have noticed in the previous post, the boat has already looked like this during the dry fit.  Everything was all lined up and fitting pretty (pretty sloppy, but what good is epoxy for but to fill all those gaps!)  Anyhow, as we screwed down the last chine panel, all of a sudden the pre-drilled holes in the plywood weren't matching up with the holes in the stringers below.  Which meant that the plywood panel wasn't lining up with the bottom or side panels, or with the other chine panel at the bow.  This was a problem - the bow especially needs to line up so the boat isn't totally off-centered!  We managed to get the holes to line up with Daddy putting lots of pressure on the plywood while I quickly screwed it down hole by hole, progressing forward, checking that the screw holes lined up with a loose drill bit.  Still the bow didn't line up.  Fortunately, without even unscrewing anything, Daddy was able to shave off enough wood from the front end of the chine panel with the circular saw to make it squeeze into place at the bow.  Whew. 

And here is the nicely fitted bow!  Once the epoxy mess is all sanded and shaped and fiberglassed, it'll look like a streamlined, well-constructed bow, worthy of a ship's figurehead. 

Here's a shot of the skeg - the brass strip hasn't been attached yet, but will be soon.  There is much sanding ahead of us, and then fiberglassing, and then I think, just maybe, we'll finally flip this boat over and start work on the seats and deck and everything else on the insides!

Back in Action - September roundup

We basically took August off due to vacations, heat (the epoxy hardens super fast in hot temperatures, meaning you have to work fast and it's hard to clean up), and bugs (mosquitoes biting us and lovebugs loving the epoxy liquid as it dries - we have all kinds of fossilized bugs in our boat!), but now we are back to work and moving along at a nice clip. The hull is almost complete (minus fiberglassing and finishing touches).

Here is the curly maple lumber we used to make the skeg. In order for the skeg to fit the curve of the bottom of the boat, we used an ingenious device: pencil and a block of wood.  We drew a line on the board, and once we cut that line, it fit perfectly to the bottom of the boat. The skeg is two pieces of curly maple to add width at the base.  After we had one all cut out with the tail end how we wanted it, we just traced it onto the other piece and cut out a matching piece, then glued them together.

Here's the skeg with glue drying - no nails or screws to hold it together.  After the glue had dried, we tapered it so that it is narrower at the top and wide at the base.  Then Daddy had a brass strip pre-drilled and we fitted this onto the top of the skeg and pre-drilled into the wood.  The brass strip will be attached to protect the skeg from wear and tear on sand, shells, etc when it's beached.  We sanded down the whole skeg nicely and glued it to the bottom of the boat before we finished the side panels - it's hard to crawl under the boat, but it's about to get much harder once the sides are all glued on.  We also filled the pre-drilled holes with liquid epoxy, and then we'll pre-drill again so that the screws that will have direct contact with the water will only be in epoxy and won't be touching any wood - no chance for water to get into the wood.

Dry-fitting the side panels. Once we had these shaped right, which was much harder than first imagined, we went ahead and screwed them onto the stringers and frames temporarily and then pre-drilled holes to be used to permanently glue on the sides.

Shadowfax supervises.  (Actually she doesn't like to be 5 feet away behind the gate in the backyard.  She would much rather be tied up right next to us.)

Again dry-fitting the sides and chines.  The side panels are the at the top of the boat and the chine panels are the middle panels that fit between the sides and the bottom.
We have completely glued the sides on and the two short sections of chine panels are glued on.  The sides were scarfed to make long panels that run the whole length of the boat, whereas the chine panels are each being connected with a butt block - a small piece of plywood that is glued to the inside of both panel sections where they meet.  We have made our butt blocks and are just waiting for a non-rainy and not-too-hot evening to glue on the long chine panel sections, and then the hull will be complete!