Day 25 - Bottom Glued

Whoa! I'm bushed. This was a big job. I spent the morning fairing stringers and truing the jig. I sanded the inside of the bottom where the stringers meet the hull and glued the stringers and bow stem in place. That brought us to lunch and hammock time. It was getting hot so I put off the rest of the work until 10pm when things had cooled down some. I mixed up about 1/2 gallon of epoxy paste and glopped it on the stringers and bow stem after wetting out all the glue surfaces with straight epoxy. Then all 250+ lbs of me hopped up and crawled around on the boat screwing it down. This is right about when my body was telling me it was time for bed but no, you can't do that until you crawl around under the boat and clean up all the "ooze out."
I was glad to see that there was ooze from the forward 2 feet of the stringers. I had spent some time reshaping the tips and had things pretty much within 1/2". Renn does say that when you climb up on the boat it will come down and take up that space. I'd still like to see a closer fit. Anyway, what a terrible, messy job! Most of the epoxy was thick and was starting to set. I had to use my heat gun and putty knife to clean up the ooze and turn it into fillets. Doing this up and down the length of the boat on both sides of the stringers is not fun. Especially at midnight. I finally finished at 1am. Of course I had epoxy all over the place. In my hair, beard, elbows, down my back, you name it, I had some epoxy there.

The last thing I did was double check the jig for fairness because I didn't want the boat to dry with any twists. I was worried that with me climbing around up there, well who knows...? Sure enough one of the jig extenders was sagging 1/2 an inch. I squared it again and all is well. Tomorrow I have to work but I should have time to cut off the extra material at the transom and start thinking about the sides. Renn gave me instructions for the new method using only two scarfs making one, long 24' piece of plywood from the three 8' sections. I'll be sure to take some pictures of that when I do it.