Having now made what can be described as a boat, I need to make it seaworthy. There’s wood filler and caulk and epoxy and paint to be applied. I need to get the boat ready for that.
The main thing is to glass the chines. That’s what I call it anyway, although with my chines being internal, I’m not really glassing them proper. I’m glassing the outside joint made by the bottom and the side.
And right now that joint is way too sharp to hold the tape, or at least that’s what I gather from reading my Michalak. So the big job this weekend was taking the rasp to the bottom to make that joint rounder.
And what a slog that was, going all the way around the boat. I wasn’t keeping exact time or anything, but I’m guessing it was about two hours. It was hard work, but it was satisfying as well.
While I was at it, I finally cut off the excess of the gunwales both at the transom and the stem. I rounded them a little bit as well, with the rasp, as best as I could with the boat upside down. I’ll make them more symmetrical when next the boat is right side up.
Next step is to fill the seams of the butt blocks with wood filler, in preparation for covering those same seams with fiberglass tape embedded in epoxy, glassing the seams same as the chines will get glassed. I bought Minwax High Performance Wood Filler to use for these critical seams, as opposed to the cheaper DAP Plastic Wood filler that I’d used way back in like Week 2 or so for filling the knot holes on the C side of the BC plywood.