Slow day

Never mind that it seemed like I was at it all day, in the end I don't feel like I made a lot of progress. One thing I'm figuring out is that when you are working with epoxy, you can only work so fast: The thing you worked on last has to cure before you can work on it again, and that takes time.

Today's goal was to get the excess length on the keelson trimmed off, and to get the cheek pieces attached to the bow and the transom.

First "oops" of the day was actually an oops from yesterday. It didn't occur to me that the squeeze out from laminating the keelson would run down into the jig and fasten down the keelson. Had to break that off. There are a couple of spots on the inside face (the side that is going to show in the bottom of the boat) where the plywood got munged up a bit. No worries. I'll get to that in a minute.

Of course, when trimming off the excess length, I managed to botch both ends of the keelson. I thought I was being careful, but ended up running the circular saw through the transom knees on both ends. Oops. Spent a few minutes in my thinking chair before I realized I could fix the mistake by buttering them up with thickened epoxy. The result looks like this:

and this:

The stern got the worst of it. I used the "fast" hardener on the epoxy, but its still not ready (four hours later) for sanding, so I'll do that tomorrow. I'm pretty sure that after I sand down the epoxy, things will work out just fine.

This was my first test using thickened epoxy as well. After I mixed it up, I added a bunch of wood flour (actually, sawdust from my belt sander collection bag) until it had a consistency somewhere between catchup and peanut butter. I think that worked out pretty well.

And I used some of the same batch of thickened epoxy to spread over the wounded parts on the inside face of the keelson. I'll sand those smooth tomorrow as well.

Next task was to cut and attach the cheek pieces on the transoms. This involved taking some of the 1" lumber I planed down a couple of weeks ago, and cutting it, beveling it, and epoxying them to the bow and stern.

Just missed a near disaster here. On the bow, I was just about to glue them up when I realized I had sized everything to the outside of the boat, not the inside. Glad I caught that when I did. As it stands, the cheeks are a little shorter than they should be, but I think that's going to be ok. Worst case is I have to make up some filler blocks, but I think the curve of the top of the boat will take care of it. 

You can see what I am talking about here in this shot. In a perfect world, those side pieces would extend all the way to the bottom of the plywood (which is actually the top of the boat).

Here is the stern:

What I did on each of these is carefully position the cheek pieces that will be on the bottom of the boat, but not attach them. I need to wait until I position both the bow and the stern, then carefully carve those pieces around the keelson and the transom knees. Accordingly, I've got them cut, but kept them a bit long so I can fine tune them later before finally gluing them on.

Getting more and more comfortable working with the epoxy as well. For these joints, I spread some standard  mix on both surfaces, then went back over it with another mix that had been thickened to catchup consistency with wood flour. After I had the pieces glued and screwed in place, I added more wood flour to make a heavy paste and smeared it in the screw holes. Those should sand smooth and fair tomorrow.