S/V Ripple

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...

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 pean...

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 ...