In the morning I mixed up two bags of fiberglass thickened with Cell-o-Fill to try to finish gluing and filling the laps on the port side of the boat. I was concerned that I wouldn't have enough Cell-o-Fill powder to finish the task (and several others) so I wrote an urgent email to Chesapeake Light Craft to ask if it would be suitable to substitute wood flour for the Cell-o-Fill. Within an hour I got a positive reply from John Harris, the owner of the company, saying that he uses both thickeners more-or-less interchangeably. I was please by the rapid response. Everything about this kit is well-designed,
and there is plenty of support for home builders. That leads to a satisfying experience and a successful project.
With the help of of third bag of fiberglass / Cell-o-Fill, I finished filling up all the laps so that the hull is now glued together. The goal is to fill the laps to the very brim -- both because that will produce a stronger joint and because after sanding it should also be prettier. The manual suggests that you avoid getting glue on the stitches so that they will be easier to pull after it dries, but I was not skillful enough to do that and perhaps my glue a little too runny. I went ahead and put glue right over the stitches. But to avoid having to deal with "glued in" stitches, I waited a few hours for the glue to get tacky and then crawled beneath the boat to clip all the stitches in the hull panels (not the bulkheads, bow, or stern). This allowed me to pull the wires before they were entombed for life.
With the remnant of mixed glue I also finished the the rails and attached the rudder cheeks and the dagger-board handles.
Since it was too rainy for a bike ride in the afternoon, I went on to use the templates for the mast and the spars to trace the relevant outlines on my glued-up sailing lumber. As an experiment I then used my hand-held circular saw to cut out the spars. I did a pretty ragged job of it, but I was still able to use my hand plane to shape one end of a perfectly satisfactory spar. I followed the advice of John Harris and went to work aggressively. I prefer light spars and trust his recommendation to err on the side of light spars rather than suffer with heavy ones.
Shaping spars with a hand-held circular saw and an old plane is going to be a challenge, but I can already see that I can produce results that will satisfy me. The spars I can carve might not meet professional standards, but they will be attractive and useful.
It's only when you complete a task for the first time that you begin to understand the various pitfalls. The beauty of the Northeaster Dory comes in part from the curves of its lines -- particularly the curve of the sheer. But these curves mean that the boat cannot possibly sit level on the saw horses when it is upside down. Thickened glue -- if it is at all runny -- will tend to run down toward the bow and stern (and drip onto the floor). But if the glue is too thick it won't penetrate deeply enough into the laps to provide strong joints and perhaps won't even settle into smooth seams. Even though in hindsight I may have mixed my glue a little too thin, it did not drip through to the inside of the boat in more than a couple of spots. But the thin mixture did make it harder for me to get the laps filled to the top and to avoid getting glue on the stitches. You win some; you lose some. It's the final product that matters.
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