35.) How Not to Vacuum Bag

This is not the way a vacuum bagging project is supposed to look. The sandbags are the giveaway; they are a resource to turn to when trying to stave off disaster.

I began this phase of the project excited to finally have begun the process of rebuilding the boat. My shop mates quickly noticed I was up to something unusual, so I also had a curious audience.

Making a vacuum bag is the best method for installing planks on the inside of the boat. Done right, the bag provides a clamping force that distributes pressure evenly. I thought I was being conservative by confining this step to six planks. A professional would try to do the whole hull, or at least half of it, in one shot. As it turned out, though, I should have been even more cautious.

I outlined where each plank would go and I numbered and marked each one. Then I mixed a batch of epoxy and used a two-inch paint roller to spread it first on the hull and then on the underside of the planks. I mixed a second batch of epoxy thickened with a filler and spread that on the hull with a finely notched plastic trowel. (The unthickened first coat seeps into the wood; the thickened mixture provides a paste between the boards and the hull, helping to fill out any hollows and to avoid voids in the laminate.)

Mixing epoxy is a bit like firing a starting pistol. The moment you blend the resin and the hardener, a chemical reaction begins that eventually turns the liquid into a hard-as-steel solid. Heat accelerates the chemical reaction. My shop thermometer showed it was 87 degrees, so I used West System's slow hardener to give myself more time. I figured I had at least an hour, maybe 90 minutes, if I got the mixture out of the pot quickly and spread out on the wood (the curing reaction slows when the epoxy molecules are distributed at greater distances from each other).

I like to think of myself as cool under fire, but for some reason, epoxy always stresses me out more than it should. Feeling under the gun, I sometimes work too frantically. And that's how I made my first mistake.

Midway through applying epoxy to the planks, I misread the markings I had written on the boards and coated the wrong side of three planks. That meant that I had to go back, turn them over, and coat the other side, too. Now I had three super slippery planks that would be difficult to wrestle in place and staple down.

Once that was done (after going through three pairs of disposable gloves), I placed a layer of release fabric (a material that doesn't stick to epoxy) over the planks. Next came a layer of a breather cloth that would enable air to flow within the bag. Last was a thick plastic sheet that would serve as the vacuum bag. I had cut all of these materials to size beforehand. I also had already surrounded three sides of the planking area with a clay-like adhesive. The adhesive is what holds the plastic bag on top of the breather cloth, release fabric, and planks. It creates a seal when air is removed from the bag. In the best of worlds, the resulting vacuum gives you the equivalent of one atmosphere of pressure (more than 2,000 pounds per square foot) spread evenly over the bag,

I initially put down only three sides of the adhesive because the fourth side had to run on top of the planks themselves after they were in place. As soon as I started putting the fourth strip down, I recognized the makings of disaster. The clay refused to stick properly to the three planks with epoxy on the wrong side. I quickly wiped as much off as I could and did my best to try to get the adhesive to adhere.

The last step in vacuum bagging is to run a perforated hose under the plastic bag, attach it to a pump, and start removing air from inside the bag. The bag needs to be leak-free to remove all of the air. When I flipped the switch on the pump, I could hear hissing. A lot of hisssssssssssssssssing, in fact. I had a typhoon of leaks. Most were in the area where the fresh epoxy was keeping the adhesive clay from sticking properly. It's not unusual to have a few leaks at first, but this was way worse than usual.

I spent the next 20 or so minutes frantically trying to plug the holes, using more clay, tape, and plastic. But it was a losing battle. When I only had about 10 minutes left before the epoxy started to "go off" or harden, I got desperate and started running around the shop looking for a solution. At the last minute, I found four 50-pound sandbags and set them down in the area where I was getting the most leaks.  At the very least, I surmised, the sandbags would apply uniform pressure on the wood the same way the vacuum bag was supposed to, though at about a tenth of the force.

But .... I also got lucky: the sandbags greatly reduced the amount of leaking. A decent, but not great, vacuum developed inside the bag. As an added measure, I fastened wood clamps on the top of each plank.

Then I collapsed on my shop stool, exhausted, drenched in sweat, and disappointed. And that's when the ribbing started.

"What do you got going on there, Mr. Boatbuilder?", one of my fellow woodworkers asked as he passed by.

"Preparing for a flood?" remarked another.

"Oh, so that's what a vacuum bag isn't supposed to look like", said a third.

Ha. Ha. Joke's on me.

In coming posts I hope to be able to show that I regained my composure, learned from my mistakes, and executed a much better vacuum-bagging operation.

Below is a photo I took the next morning after I removed the bags and adhesive, sanded the epoxy off the top of the three planks, and did a little filling between the seams. They still need a fairly aggressive hand sanding.  But, in the end, the sandbags did their job. It wasn't a complete disaster.

Note: the red Bessey clamps are holding the hull in the mold. The new planks should help the boat regain some of its designed shape.

34.) A Free Lunch!

Do you love sanding?

No?  Are you sure?  Want to think it over at little more carefully before you reply?

Okay. Alright. I don't love it either. But it is and probably always will be a critical part of boat work. So that's why this humble boat restorer decided to invest four hours of his day today attending a free seminar focused exclusively on the topic of sanding. It was sponsored by Stiles, a Michigan-based machinery company, hosted by a cabinet shop in Greenpoint, and attended by a representative from 3M.

Overall, the session was kind of disappointing. I learned much more about sanding technique several years ago by spending half an hour with Carl at McMichael's Yacht Yard in Mamaroneck. Carl is a real treasure. He transforms sanding into something approaching an art form. He doesn't use machines or sanding blocks, but instead folds a piece of sandpaper carefully in his palm and goes to work, letting his trained hands feel the highs and lows he needs to even out with the paper. He also feels the resistance of the paper as it scratches the surface, information that tells him how close he is to being able to move to a higher grade. He focuses on one small area at a time and doesn't move on to the next until he has the object of his current focus finished. He does amazing work that I can't duplicate in either speed or quality no matter how hard I try. His level of patience and discipline are superhero qualities to me. I'm patient, too, but if sanding were a sport I'd be on the junior farm team and Carl would be on the starting lineup on a pro team. 

I did learn something at the event that I had never heard before that I think is worth passing on. It's this: As soon as it is freshly sanded, wood that's newly exposed to air begins to oxidize. Within 24 to 48 hours, it's composition is affected and starts to change. This matters because it affects the ability of a finish to penetrate the wood fibers, impacting the appearance of a finish (especially a stain, varnish, sealer—or anything transparent) as well as the adhesion of the coating.

The bottom line: don't let 24 hours elapse between the time you finish sanding something (whether it's a mahogany tiller or a hardwood floor) and the first coat of finish. The 3M guy said that cabinet makers who complain about the results they get in the finishing room often end up revealing that they typically complete construction on Friday and begin the finishing process on Monday. Big mistake.

If in doubt, MMM suggest you try the drip test. Put droplets of water on your sanded wood and see if the droplets disperse and penetrate the wood or if they tend to sit intact on the surface. If the latter happens, the oxidation has become a problem and will lead to things like stain blotches on a beautiful piece of hard maple.

A piece of sandpaper rated 36 is not exactly interchangeable with one rated P36.

Another thing I suspected but didn't know for sure is that a regular 220 grit sandpaper is different from P220 paper. The ratings with the P follow the European numbering system, which has been gaining in popularity. They are not radically different, but they are different. (I don't know if that's because Europeans measure the grain count metrically rather than Imperially. I do know that the ratings for U.S.-made sandpaper relates to the number of tiny pieces of crushed rock glued to the paper per square inch. A 220 paper has 380 fewer pieces of rock on it per square inch than a 600 paper.)  There's also some new measurement system I didn't pay much attention to in which the finest paper is rated 1 and everything courser has a correspondingly higher number.   If you want to see how this confusion plays out, click on this link: http://www.mibnet.se/home-improvement/sandpaper-grit-size-comparison-between-european-and-us-standards.html  It might help you get your ps straight, if not your qs.

The final thing I learned is that 3M has developed a new sandpaper that is somewhat revolutionary (in the sanding world at least). It contains a new abrasive made of a ceramic mineral that has two advantages: first, unlike the particles on regular sandpaper, the abrasive is identically sized and shaped; second, the tiny bits of stuff that scratch gradually break down in a controlled manner forming sharp new peaks that keeps the sandpaper working.

From 3M literature: "The secret lies in the revolutionary precision-shaped ceramic grain technology pioneered by 3M. As the triangular shaped grain 

wears, it continuously fractures to form sharp points and edges that 

slice through metal, wear evenly and provide super-long life and 

consistency at any grinding pressure."

The new sandpaper is made of a ceramic mineral and the new brand is something 3M is calling "Cubritron II."  (I have no idea what happened to the first Cubitron).

"This is already a game changer in the metalworking world," the 3M guy declared—and I think that's probably at least mostly true, mind-blowing as it may be. At the moment, the new paper is available only in very rough grits for wood: 36, 60 and 80. But I plan to try to get my hands on some, try it out, and report on the results. There were no free samples at the sanding seminar (I am still shaking my head that I voluntarily went to such an event). But I did get a free roast beef sandwich.

One reason I didn't learn more at the session was that it covered a lot of stuff I already know.  If you have questions about sandpaper, drop me a line and I'll be happy to help.

33.) Multi-tasking

I've got a lot of things going on at once at the moment and this photo shows most of them. On the port side of the boat (right side of the photo), I'm still applying and sanding epoxy fairing compound to prepare for planking. You can tell it hasn't been sanded yet because it turns from dark red-brown to white with sanding. (The color change has the added advantage of helping you to see low spots that aren't scraped by the sandpaper.*) On the starboard side, the fairing is finished and I'm starting to shape mahogany planks to fit into the hull.

The planks don't go in straight, but curve along their sides. That means each has to be individually shaped by hand on one side to fit snugly against its neighbor.

The planks go in at an angle to the layer of planks below. This makes the boat stronger by aligning the grain of the wood in a crisscross pattern.** It also means the planks don't need to bend as much to fit the shape of the hull. That's not a huge deal except for near the bow, where the planks need to bend in multiple directions.

The first plank can have straight edges on two sides. I made the other two using different techniques as an experiment. For one, I used a compass to scribe a line along the edge of the plank and then cut and sanded it to fit. For the other, I used a small brass violin maker's plane (barely visible in the photo) and did most of the work by eye, taking shavings here and there until I got a good fit.

Both methods took about the same amount of time, but I had more fun using the plane. It's good to know both ways of doing it work well because some of the shapes may be more difficult when I get closer to the bow.  I have one more method I may try out on the next plank.

You probably noticed all the popsicle sticks stuck to the planks. I could say that it was a really hot day and I ate a lot of popsicles to stay cool.  But actually they're tongue depressors and I am using them with a pin gun (an air-driven tool that shoots super-skinny headless nails) to temporarily hold the planks down as I shape each one. I'll need to take the planks off again before I can epoxy them in place. My as yet untested theory is that I will be able to break off the tongue depressors and easily remove the pins with a pair of pliers. (This is another technique I made up on my own, but doubt I am the first to think of it.)

Bostitch Pin Nailer

I can't finish the job of patching the big hole in the mast step area until I install the planks. That's because the patch needs to go in on top of the new layer of planking.

The patch is almost complete. Below are a couple of photos of what it looks like. The first shows it from above with it temporarily in position. The second shows the underside of one end of the patch. Note how it is both layered and stepped. The dark lines are epoxy between each layer.  I watched those lines carefully as I sanded the bottom of the patch into a triangular shape, trying to keep them relatively straight fore and aft. The final sanding to fit should remove those lines almost completely.

The patch is also curved fore and aft to match the shape of the hull. To get that arc, I cut out a piece of plywood in the shape of the boat's bottom (working off the original plans) and then laminated the patch together with epoxy and clamped it to the plywood mold. Here's a photo of what that looked like (and also happens to be a good illustration of why woodworkers often say that there is no such thing as having too many clamps):

Finally, when I cut out the piece of plywood for the laminating mold, the matching curve in the leftover piece was perfect for making center supports for the frame that the boat sits in. If you look again at the picture at the top of this post, you can see them peeking through the big hole. They are covered in plastic so they won't stick to the hull when I epoxy everything together.

*Even though you can see one of my Festool sanders in the photo, I did 95% of the fairing on the inside of the boat by hand with 60 grit sandpaper backed with a piece of wood. It's too easy (for me at least) to add new highs and lows into a fairing job with a power sander.

**This crisscross pattern was especially important in the past when the planks were glued together and varnished. The orientation helped keep the wood from expanding and contracting as it gained and lost moisture. Because wood doesn't move much along the direction of the grain, each plank would help hold the boards above and below it in place. This is less of an issue now with epoxy, which prevents moisture from getting into the wood at all. This is a topic I'll be coming back to in more detail and will discuss why epoxy can, under certain circumstances, make the problem worse.

32.) Weekend Among the Mystics

Marisa, Cosette, and I attended our first ever Wooden Boat Show at Mystic Seaport this past weekend. No, we didn't go to Mystic Pizza, but we still had a great time and even learned a few things. If you are interested in boats made out of something other than plastic, I'd recommend you do it at least once. There are a lot of great vessels—from dinghies to ships—to look at and, if you are inclined, interesting workshops to attend. Virtually all the advertisers in Wooden Boat magazine, which co-sponsors the event, set up a booth on the Seaport grounds, so there are a lot of experts around if you have questions. West Systems was in the house: so was Lee Valley, Jamestown Distributors (promoting their Total Boat line), Mas Epoxy, Chesapeake Light Craft, and many more. A marine lumber supplier was there with some very luminescent slabs of mahogany and spruce. The restored shipyard also functions as a mill and was selling some of their surplus, as well. There was even a guy selling a portable sawmill you could take home.

Four of the workshops interested me in particular (not so much Marisa or Cosette, who spent most of the time on a park bench fielding compliments. I am pretty sure the two got more than any of the boats.)  The workshops that I had scribbled on the program as MAs, or MUST ATTENDs focused on sharpening, lofting, steam bending, and vacuum bagging. I don't want to sound conceited, but the main thing I digested at these workshops is that I am much more informed about these subjects than 96.2% of the other folks present.  Another thing I learned: the apparent target demographic of this group is a 63-year-old, white, very nerdy male wearing sandals. All apparently were sussing out retirement options. Boy, did I ever feel out of place! I'm only 59.

A few tidbits from the classes:

—The biggest difference between furniture makers and boat builders is that furniture makers like a straight edge on their planes and chisels, whereas boat builders like theirs curved.  Makes sense when you consider that there are very few 90 degree corners on a boat.

—When you are using a batten to draw a curve on a layout board, there's a cool device you can use to pin the batten down at various spots along the curve that doesn't distort the shape and allows you to position the batten precisely.  It's called a spline weight. It's made of lead and kind of looks like a little whale with the top of a coat hanger for a head. (The are also sometimes referred to as spline ducks.) You can see some in the foreground of the photo below. This tidbit comes from the lofting class. The term "lofting" comes from the place where boatyards did most of this work because it was the only place around that was even remotely clean.  The attic or—ta da—loft.

—You need freshly sawmilled green wood for steam bending, especially in the case of white oak. Steam for about an hour per inch of thickness up to about 3 inches thick. The wood needs to be free of knots and the grain needs to run straight the length of the board. If the grain curves and runs out of the wood, it will probably break when you bend it.

—Vacuum bagging is pretty easy and can be done with inexpensive materials like Mortite (a clay-like substance that's mostly used for insulation), cheap plastic drop cloths, mosquito screen, and an air pump taken out of an old discarded refrigerator.

I'll be doing some steam bending and vacuum bagging as part of the project to restore #48, so you'll get to see whether I do it right or foul it up. I might even see if I can get or make some of those spline whales and try out that technique, too.

I bought a book at the show that I'd never seen before (Preliminary Design of Boats and Ships), but my biggest splurge was for two old wooden blocks that I got for $40 each from an antique tool vendor. I probably could have negotiated a lower price, because it turned out the vendor has been drowning in the things for years. When I asked how he got them, he described an anxious phone call he received a few years back from a family whose patriarch had died. Their panic related to what they had uncovered in the dead man's basement. Are there antique tools?, the vendor asked hopefully. Not really, the family replied. When the antique guy arrived at the house and went down the basement stairs, here's what he saw: a huge pile of more than 1,000 old wooden blocks saved from old ships. It had apparently had been the primary life mission of the deceased man to rescue these old blocks.

Now, I have two of these rescue blocks in my shop, right along with my rescue dog, rescue boat, and the rescue project that is yours truly. The blocks are really nice, still work, and it's easy to tell that every bit of them was crafted by hand. You can still see the marks the blacksmith made when he pounded out the iron parts. I wish the next picture was a little better (There's too much red in it for one thing: the block is just a dark wood. Damn iPhone.), but I think you'll get the idea.

Several people have asked me if I am doing a "museum quality" restoration of #48. After looking at many of the many boats at Mystic, I can now answer that question with a resounding conviction: NO. My restoration is going to be vastly superior to the work done at Mystic in attention to detail, in finish quality, and in on the water performance. I'm not saying the Seaport workers don't do a good job, but I think they have to work quickly on a budget and simply don't have time for a lot of truly fine work. They want the boats to look presentable and to retain the materials and methods used in its original construction.  So they don't use a spray gun, for instance, for painting. Everything is done with a brush, just like the old days.

My goal on the other hand, it to try to produce a truly beautiful boat. The only boat I saw at the Wooden Boat Show that met the standards I hold for myself was a homemade DN Iceboat. It had been expertly crafted by a very nice young guy from New Jersey. I took a bunch of pictures of it and will show two. One is a close-up of the boat's head support for the reclining driver. The other shows the strut that supports the rear runners.

Nice, huh? I was really impressed with the DN, a boat I've always wanted to try and may yet make myself. They've been North America's most popular ice boat class ever since 1953, when the Detroit News sponsored the design contest that launched the boat. I also like the fact that the DN is named after a newspaper, blending two areas of personal interest. They race over on Lake Hopatcong in Jersey (when there is enough ice and not too much snow.) They go 60 mph in 20 knots of breeze. Talk about frostbiting!

31.) Working on the Patch

Here's the beginnings of the patch for the big hole.  (The photograph makes it look so much like an art object that I am almost tempted to hang it.)

It was made from a single piece of mahogany, re-sawed into strips (the same as the planks*), and shaped with a bandsaw. I used the Sparkman & Stephens plans as a guide, rather than the boat itself. I'd rather adjust the boat to the patch than the other way around.

I haven't staggered the ends yet to fit into the ladder (which is almost finished and will appear in an upcoming post), nor have I planed or sanded the sides.  I also haven't glued them together in the curve they will need to follow. This photo just shows the flat pieces stacked up on top of each other in the reverse order that they will go in the boat. Below is a photo showing how the pieces were sketched out one by one. They had to be designed to taper quicker toward the bow and more gradually toward the center of the boat, to match the shape of the hull. The S&S plans don't specify how to do this. They just show the thickness of the keelson, it's width at the top, and the angle of the hull at various stations from bow to stern. I presume that sorting out the remaining details was left to the builder. I am still trying to figure some of them out even as I write this, and I can foresee all sorts of ways that I could seriously and completely foul this up.

*I used a different, much cheaper bandsaw blade on these pieces. It was a Wood Slicer, available from Highland Woodworking.  It costs a third of the Lennox carbide-tipped blade I used, but it produces fewer deep saw marks than the Lennox Tri-Master.  Highland sells both the Wood Slicer and the Lennox. I got the Lennox because it was billed to last a long time.  One of my shop mates ripped a third of the teeth off the blade within a few weeks.

30.) Stairway to ?

Below is a close-up view of the steps I am carving into the keelson as it rises up toward the bow. I thought it was worth showing. This project at times is sort of like the woodworking version of an archaeological dig. The original boatbuilder assembled the keelson by gluing together thin strips of mahogany (like plywood) to make a single piece 9/16ths of an inch thick that curves around the bottom of the boat from stem to stern. My plan is to rejoin these strips one at a time, making a laddered scarf joint.  (It will require a corresponding flight of steps, or ladder, on the other side of the hole.)

It's not especially easy to make this particular ladder.  I'm carving it out with a paring chisel and small rasp while sitting awkwardly in the boat instead of at a workbench where you can see what you are doing and get the right leverage. See the brownish blob on the right side of the photo? That's epoxy fairing compound. See the blob on the left? That's a pool of my sweat.  (I suppose I also could have done this excavation work with a small power tool like a Dremel, but that just seemed too, well, unmanly.)

The other reason it's not easy is that the stairs can't be straight but instead need to follow the downward curve of the keelson.  The only good solution I could come up with to make this happen was to gradually carve and file away tiny bits of material until I hit the thin glue line between each set of mahogany plies. Once the glue line was exposed, I could then just gently remove it to expose wood only.

The photo shows this work in progress.  See how one of the steps in the middle looks black?  That's because I've cut it down so that just the old glue is showing. The stairs above it have all the glue carefully removed.  The ones below it are unfinished.  (I still have some final trimming and sanding to do to square up and complete all of the stairs.)

The unfinished stairs show just bits of the glue line.  That means they are cutting through multiple plies and not yet in line with the slope of the keelson.  No black stripes means the step is confined to one of the original mahogany plies.

I hope the above explanation is clear.  If it's still a little fuzzy, it should become more understandable as I forge ahead.

29.) Cosette Ponders the Keelson Conundrum

28.) The Hole in the Boat

The photo above shows what may be the single biggest challenge I face in restoring #48. See the big hole in the boat?  That's right where the mast is supposed to be supported.

Holes are almost never a good thing in a boat.  But this is truly the last place you'd want one.  So....how did it get there?

This area of the hull probably absorbs the most stress of any spot in the Interclub. The mast in anything more than a light breeze pushes down into the boat, especially when the crew is hiking over the side. I found this out on my first day of racing, when the mast step on my virtually new fiberglass Interclub cracked and collapsed, forcing me to stop sailing for a month while I repaired it.

I don't think the original Sparkman and Stephens design fully recognized how much stress this area of the boat must handle (nor, for that matter, did the builder of my fiberglass boat: Karl's Boat Shop).

When I began working with #48 I realized I was going to face this problem. The area was cracked and showed lots of evidence of rot. I started chipping away at the bad wood and the next thing I knew I went right through the bottom. When I had finally removed all the unsalvageable material, I was left with the very un-hydrodynamic void you see in the photo.

There are several factors that make this especially challenging to fix.

First, the repair has to be super strong.  That should be obvious because this was the part of the boat that held up least well over time.

What's less obvious is that the repair area is a very complex shape. The keelson—or backbone of the boat that joins the starboard and port halves—starts at around two inches wide at the bow, gradually widens to 5 inches at midships and then tapers to four inches at the stern. The angle of the hull changes as it intersects the keelson, from around 90 degrees at the bow to something like 160 degrees three feet back from the bow. And, of course, the whole piece has to bend to conform to the shape of the bottom of the boat. So we're talking about a patch that constantly changes form through three dimensions.

Finally, the damage also extended into the planking, making matters even more troublesome.

For months, I have been tempted to remedy the problem in a radical way. I'd saw the boat in half right down the middle, remove the entire keelson (also ok to spell it "kelson") and make a brand new one from stem to stern. Then I'd join the two halves to it.  I was convinced that this was not only one of the easiest ways to fix the problem (the keelson is cracked in other places as well and has another big hole back where the skipper must have stomped his feet a lot) but also would create the soundest repair.

Here's what a keelson looks like when a wooden boat is being built (upside down).  It is, for all practical purposes, the spine of a ship.  And mine has a big chunk of its backbone missing in probably the most critical area of the boat.

What stopped me, though, was that I realized that by the time I had finished removing the keelson, the remaining two hull halves would weigh less than a total of 70 pounds. To reduce the hull to less than half its original weight (minus spars and racing equipment) seemed to me to violate the whole spirit of a restoration project. I would, in effect, be building a new boat using little more than scraps from the original one. I decided this would run afoul of the spirit of the class rules prohibiting construction of new wooden boats (something I wrote about earlier in this blog. See Holes and Loopholes).

So....what to do instead?  

I've got another plan. And you can see the first stages of it if you enlarge the picture at the top and inspect the keelson just in front of the hole. There, I have started roughing out what looks like a flight of stairs that gradually ascend toward the bow.

I'll explain more about how (I hope) this is all going to work out in upcoming posts.

Below is a photo of what the area around the mast step looked like before I started chopping away at it:

Some people might have try a different, quicker approach than removing the rotten, cracked wood. They'd undoubtedly use a penetrating epoxy product that is supposed to infuse the wood with its original equivalent strength. I don't believe the hype and think diluted epoxy is a half-assed fix.  I am only up for complete-ass fixes.

27.) Battening Down the Hull

 

I've been doing most of the fairing inside the hull with a flexible spruce batten wrapped in 60 grit sandpaper. I don't always try to cover the whole batten, but use different lengths of sandpaper depending on the size of the spot I am smoothing out. The bare parts of the batten don't remove wood I want to stay on the boat, but help bend the batten to the shape of the hull. I thought of this technique on my own for fairing an inside curve. I highly doubt I am the first to come up with the idea; I won't be applying for a patent anytime soon.

The photo above shows the third and last coat of fairing material (epoxy plus filler) on the inside of the hull. It's much thinner than the first two coats and went on very smooth.  The density of the epoxy paste can be controlled by adding more or less filler to it.  For the first coats, I aimed for a thick peanut butter-like paste that wouldn't run. For the final coat, I mixed the epoxy to the consistency of mayonnaise.  I had to throw out one batch because I didn't like the way it turned out.  It's far better to make this call early than end up having to remove a big mess later.

Nobody asked about it (I don't have that many readers), but if you thought the little hand plane I showed in my last blog entry was as small as it gets, think again. This one is an instrument maker's plane sold by Lee Valley.

26.) Highs and Lows

>>>>>  I've been using this Lie-Nielsen convex sole block plane to help make the inside of the hull fair. This is a tiny tool, but it works great so long as the blade is sharp. The bottom of the plane is rounded from side to side and front to back for working on an inside curve.

I'm using it to take off high spots, feeling them with my hands, circling them with a pencil, and then taking some shavings until each bump feels mostly gone. (In woodworking, it's amazing how touch is often much more reliable than eyesight.) I don't yet want to remove the highs completely because I know from experience that sometimes a high spot just feels high if it's surrounded by low spots. The black squirrel tail of the plane rests in your palm as you wrap your fingers on the body, giving you more power and control.  I do wish the plane was a little bigger because I developed an ugly blister after a couple of hour using it. It was one time I have been glad the Interclub is only 11 and a half feet long.

For the low spots, I used the same method—feeling them with my hands and circling them with a pencil. I mixed West System epoxy with a combination of mahogany sawdust saved from sanding the boat (I have a whole gallon paint can full of it) and microfibers.  The saw dust colors the mixture and microfibers thicken the epoxy so it doesn't run. I made the first coat pretty thick and will make the next coat much thinner. The best way to apply is with a plastic spreader. Plop a small batch on to a piece of cardboard or plywood and use just like a painter's pallette. I don't usually worry too much about getting the first coat down perfectly smooth, but I also try not to put too much on—because that means I'll end up having to sand more off.  It takes practice to find just the right balance. In the very upper right corner of the bottom photo, you can see that the rail is completely gone.  (Click on the photo to expand.)