Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Day 7

This was a very full day of work without much dramatic photographic evidence to show for it.

First thing in the morning, I went out to the garage and started inspecting and tightening the stitches we put into the hull yesterday. Then I found some straight sticks of lumber to lay crosswise in order to check the hull for any undesired twist. It came out perfectly.

About 9:30 our friends Terry and Kathy came over so that Terry could help me flip the boat over bottom-side-up.

After we visited for a while, I got back to work by laying out the spars and the rails so that I could glue them together in case I had some extra glue later on in the day. I also spent a happy hour or so cutting another 25 PVC clamps so that I would have 60+ clamps on hand when it comes time to glue on the rails.

Finally, I got down to mixing up pastry bags of thickened epoxy glue. With the first bag I glued the lowermost hull panel to the bottom. I used the remnant of that bag to glue together the spars and parts of the rails.

After lunch I mixed three sequential pastry bags and glued all the hull panels on the starboard side of the boat as well as part of one panel on the port side. I should be able to finish up tomorrow morning. This whole pastry bag business is very nerve-wracking. I don't have steady hands in the best of circumstances (and would have made the world's worst surgeon), but this job really got to me. I've used fiberglass often enough in the past to know what a mess it can be to clean up. Trying to drip a bead of fiberglass into all these narrow cracks studded with lots of sharp copper wires always trying to rip the bag or snag my Latex gloves or slice my tender flesh (and make me bleed all over the expensive Okoume plywood) put me into a trembling terror. As a result my bead wandered way too much.

I did get the job done and subsequently resigned myself to the laborious task of cleaning up all the drips. The outcome is probably going to be fine.

After dinner Sue and I both went into the garage to snip all the wire stitches that I have already glued so that we could pull them while they were still tacky and clean up the little gobs of still-sticky epoxy that tended to gather around the stitches. My theory is that the stitches are no longer necessary as long as I allow sufficient time for these "welds" to harden before flipping the boat over again. Time will tell.