The Wooden Boat Project

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This week I continued with my work on the chines, which is the joint of the side and floor. Last time I laid down the thickened epoxy, fiber glass tape, and more epoxy. The mistake I made was to put thickened epoxy back over top of the fiber glass tape. It was so thick that it was hard to get smooth. So when I went to sand this week I could see that it was going to take a lot of work. I decided that instead of sanding it down to add more thickened epoxy in the hope that it would help even it out. I did have to sand all of the epoxy so that the new epoxy would stick to the old. This should make it better but my guess is that I will have to do this again next week.

With the help of my father and one of his coworkers we flipped the boat. I was amazed at how light it was and how sturdy if felt. It was a pretty cool felling. I then spent the rest of the day clipping off the plastic zip ties and working to remove the wire ties. The plastic ties clipped easy and sanded down just as fast as the wood so they presented no problem. It was a little more involved process to get the wire out of their holes as they were glued in. I clipped the top side of the wire close to the bottom of the boat I then heated up the longer end of the wire and pry it out with some big pliers. It was pretty simple.

After this I used the belt sander with some really aggressive sand paper to match up the chines on the outside of the boat and then round out the sides and smoothed out the epoxy drips and such. After this was done I then went in with more thickened epoxy and filled in the gaps and places that just didn’t match up the on boards. I really had to mold the prow so that I can round it out with the sander so that it will look right when I put the fiber glass on it.

In the next couple of weeks I will plan to finish preparing the outside and the inside by more sanding and gluing the boards to hold the seats in place. I’ve taken an extra day off the first week of February so as long as nothing odd comes up I should have a good three days to glass the bottom and put as many layers of epoxy on the outside as possible. Besides the rough joint at the chines everything is going well.