Saturday, April 13,2002
It was a warm one here in sunny California. High temperature was a balmy 83 degrees, although in the sun it was much warmer than that.
I started the day out by routing the slots for the chine shelves but got waylaid by a cantankerous thirty or so year old Sears router. Ding dang thing kept going out of adjustment moving my slot from perfectly in the middle of the 1/2" plywood to the lower portion. I'd readjust and tighten the thumb screw with pliers to no avail. Just about drove me crazy. Wife had to threaten me with duct tape over the mouth since I was inventing new four letter words to express my disdain to my Dad's hand-me-down router.
My wife being the understanding wife she is, said to just go get me a new modern router that works properly. I said okay as I was backing out of the driveway. Got a very lovely and ergonomically friendly Milwaukee router that worked perfectly all day long. Nice features: Rubber grip that goes around the barrel, and quick release and micro adjustment for depth control. Yay!
Since the old router buggered up two good chunks of wood I had to do an extra bit of epoxying. Oh well, Epoxy conquers all.
Cut the slats to fill the slots, coated the slats and slots with unthickened epoxy and let those partially cure, whilst drilling holes and stitching the front part of the chine shelves. I ended up making a jig to help keep the front part of the shelf nice and parallel to the floor. Also propped the shelf up all along the bottom with 2x4's and spring clamps. I want this boat to be true so I constantly walk around measuring and eyeballing stuff. 
Filling the slots with thickened glue did not go as easily as I desired. The hottest weather I've experienced yet made two pots of epoxy go off and made me run around like a sweaty, grumpy mad man I was. Somehow I got the right chine shelf on, stitched up and puttied here an there up front and completely in the rear. Had to rig up 2x4's with clamps to squeeze in the chine shelf, but still ended up with a largish gap. Epoxy!!! (conquers all)
So tomorrow has to go smoother than today. Will tape up the right chine shelf and while that's curing, will install the left chine shelf, tape it up and try, try, try to glass the inside of the bottom. I wanted to finish the bottom this weekend, but I'm just too ding dang pokey.
Sunday April 14, 2002
Life is good. We had another beautiful day, although a bit cooler and way windy.
Got busy this morning by scraping the glued up chine on the right side in preparation for taping. Yesterday's heat cured this glue faster than normal and made it hard as a rock over night. After scraping to my heart's and arm's content I filled in a few holes with thickend glue and then coated a five inch swath going the length of the chine with unthickended glue. After this had cured for a little bit, I squeegeed on some glass tape, smoothed it out and then worked on a few air bubbles here and there. While that cured I prepped the left hand chine by painting on unthickened glue in the bottom's slots and then did the same for the chine slots. Added thickened glue to the slots on the bottom, squeezed in a slat then filled the chine slot with thick glue and squeezed everything together. Ah, much easier today than yesterday.
Stitched the front chine, glued here and there between the stitches and clamped all over to keep things nice and aligned. After the glue cured a bit I removed the stiches and filled in the gaps. Then glued and taped the chine flat seam. Didn't get to glass the bottom. Will try and do that this week if it's warm when I get home. Otherwise, it'll be next weekend.
Photo on left: What a mess home made tape can be with unkempt strings of glass every which way to clean up. Middle photo: Masking tape is sometimes the perfect clamp. It's good enough for guitar makers, it's good enough for me. Photo on right: After a long day epoxying and glassing and scrape, scrape, scraping, a feller deserves a cold dark beer.