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Showing posts from December 29, 2013

Off the Mold!

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The sistered-keel glue-up worked fine and it looks good.  I rough-cut the daggerboard slot with a sabre saw and then used a piloted strait bit on the router to finish.  Some sanding and final shaping of the skeg is all that remains before I prime the bottom. I couldn't resist popping the boat off the mold to see what the inside looks like.  There is a LOT of cleanup ahead before any serious work gets done on the interior.  I honestly don't know at this point whether it was worth while taping off the interior of the planks before I glued them up.  The tape is difficult to get off where the epoxy is thick.  Removing it is a tedious job with a scraper and chisel, but I think it would be even worse without the tape. Ideally, one would clean up the squeeze-out at the time of glue-up, but the space between frames is so small on this boat that getting at the seams is difficult and awkward. I may be singing a different song after a few hours of chiseling and scraping hardened ep

Keel Sisters

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The daggerboard slot emerges from the keel at approximately the width of the keel, so it is necessary to sister the keel on each side at this point.   I somewhat arbitrarily chose a two foot span... about 6 inches fore and aft of the slot, tapered back to the running width of the keel.  The keel and sisters join in a simple a planed joint, but the surface where the sisters meet the hull is a winding bevel.  I spiled the shape of the hull onto a pattern,  transferred it to two blanks of Alaskan yellow ceder and cut them out.  I then found the bevel on each end of the blanks with a block plane, and used a sweet little Japanese wood block plane with a convex sole to render the winding bevel between the ends.  The gap-filling properties of epoxy peanut butter reduce the demands on my craftiness (copious squeezeout is my friend). I free-handed a gentle S-curve taper, bandsawed the curve, smoothed it with the stationary belt sander,  mixed the peanut butter,  and clamped the whole thing

The Keel Goes On

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The outbone of the boat is comprised of the keel, the skeg, and the outer stem (and then, the rails).  I elected to glue the outer stem and the keel before final fitting and fastening to the hull.  I think this was a mistake.  It would have been easier to fit had I attached the keel, then fit the stem.  Having them as a single piece made it fussier to handle and fit, but it worked out. I glued the pieces together in a lap joint about 5 inches long, did a preliminary fitting to mark the width of the stem where it meets the gains at the bow, and marked the outer edge so that i could plane it to just wider than a piece of half oval that I will fit to the finished stem.  I did the planing at the bench, with a couple of fittings in between. I pre-drilled three screw holes in the complete keel assembly to fasten the keel and cut some sky-clamps to wedge the aft section to the hull (springy 6-footers that exert a downward pressure on the keel when wedged against the ceiling).  I mixed u