Inside out

Yesterday we flipped the canoes and removed the forms from the inside... I am VERY happy at how the epoxy flattened out and the how little sanding I will have to do to the outside. Today I trimmed off the excess fiberglass and made the first pass with a paint scrapper on the inside. This helps to take out the glue drips, splinters and starts the fairing process. Right now I would estimate that the hulls weigh no more than 20 lbs...

Things are good enough that I think I can jump right in with 60 grit paper on my random orbital and give these babies the smooth..... another day of sanding.... oh well.....

Fiberglass and epoxy

Sanding is finally done and its time to move on to fiberglass and epoxy. You can see by the mat finish that the glass is in place and the first coat of epoxy has wet out the glass. With the two canoes it was about a 6 hour process from start to finish.

Next comes two fill coats of epoxy that, as it says, fills the weave of the glass and buries it a bit so that we can sand and smooth before the final varnish goes on.

Now its starting to look pretty shinny.... but we are not done yet! One more fill coat to go then we can flip them over, pull out the forms and start this process again.

Scraping, Planing, Sanding

Now that the canoes have complete hulls, the next step is fairing. This is a process of scraping, planing and sanding all the little ridges and bumps out of the strips to give us a nice smooth surface for the fiberglass to stick to.

The simple tools I use for this process are simple indeed. A paint scraper takes all of the glue drips off and some of the real rough edges. One side of the scraper is sharpened flat and the other side is sharpened with a convex curve to fit inside the hull. A low angle block plane is then used at an angle across the strips to level them and give us a nice smooth surface. This will take care of the majority of problems and makes a lot of cedar curls.

And then its time for the random orbital sander, starting with 60-80 grit paper to finish grinding smooth an then a final sanding with 120 grit to remove the last of the scratches.

This is also the best part of the building process to really get a chance to know the canoe, because it is a canoe now, no longer a pile of strips or empty forms. With each wisk, wisk, wisk of the plane you are in constant contact with the boat. You feel for ridges, check for smooth. Your fingers explore all of the joints, what your eyes can't see, your fingers will expose. As you smooth and shape you get a feeling for what the final hardware and rigging should look like, what materials should be used... call me crazy but it talks to you, tells you who it is and what it wants to be... 

Closure

Hay folks, we have closure at last! The hulls are complete on the two solo canoes. Next step is to spend the day fairing the hulls in anticipation of fiberglass!

bottom view

I just love this picture, it shows the strip construction on the bottom of one of the double bladed, solo canoes i am working on. Just a little further to go before we can do fiberglass and epoxy.
Its nice to see the progress. Still in rough form, soon will be lots of sanding, fairing and smoothing of the hull. The joints look pretty tight although i might have to fill a crack or two.