Scraping and Sanding Done

I managed to make some more headway over the last couple of days. I got stuck in and finished scraping the bulk of the glue from the interior.







I launched into it again today. Using a random orbital sander (borrowed from my father-in-law), I sanded the left over glue and managed to get that all done as well. The bow an stern were a bit too tight to get into with the sander, so I further scraped and hand sanded as best I could.








Now she's pretty much ready for interior epoxy and installation of the keel fillet, prior to glassing the inside. I'm back to work tomorrow so that will have to be a job for Tuesday (weather permitting).

Start Scraping Interior

With it being such a busy time of the year, I haven't gotten as far as I'd hoped (a familiar theme). There's been the usual insanity with Christmas preparation/family stuff, but I've been lucky enough to get the whole week off from Christmas day. Unfortunately the weather has also been pretty crappy lately so I've lost a lot of time (oh, for a decent boat-shed), however I have made some small progress.

I attached those temporary gunwales and used some left over cedar strips for spreader sticks. These I stapled to the gunwales and they seem to work ok.




I left the molds sitting in the hull, hopefully they can help maintain the shape a bit.



Yesterday I spent loads of time scraping glue from the inside of the hull. What a tedious, mind-numbing process that is. A couple of essential tools for the job are an ipod and a limited intellect (both of which I happen to possess). I found a narrowish chisel to be the best tool, but I couldn't help sometimes gouging the planking with the corners of the chisel whilst ploughing away in a drooling stupor. Anyway, I somehow managed to get about half of the hull scraped. In the photo below, the scraped section appears to be a little bit rough but that's just an illusion. It is actually quite rough. Hopefully once I sand the interior, it will look somewhat better.








This is how far I got. Hopefully it won't take too long to get it ready for sanding. I'm pretty keen to get the inside all cleaned up and fiber glassed. The last thing I 'd want to happen now would be for water to get in or the hull to start distorting.

Finally, Some Progress

At last I can try and make some progress on the poor old canoe. She looked pretty forlorn out the back under her tarp. There were even vine type weeds growing through her (I feel quite ashamed).



I've been trying to work out how to rig a tarp to form a decent shelter that I can work under, but after my disastrous earlier attempts I decided to go for something a bit more elemental instead (namely, the big Jacaranda tree out back). Not very waterproof but it is light and airy.



So with the family out for the day I got stuck in and I'm happy to say that I had a really productive day. I was worried that the hull might have distorted because of having the outside glassed and the inside still raw timber, but it actually didn't look any different from the way it did when I last tucked her away. So lucky (the test panels warped horribly after a few weeks when I'd only glassed the one side). I was also stoked to find that the hull popped straight off the molds without any forcing or swearing at all.



With the hull removed, I quickly got the molds off and made up a cradle. I modified the strongback (made it more level and lower), then mounted the cradle to the strongback and fitted some carpet to protect the hull.



Then I flipped the hull over and placed it into the cradle. I used a grinder to trim the fiberglass/epoxy excess around the gunwale. It's so cool to finally have something that actually looks like a canoe.



I also managed to rip a scrap bit of timber for temporary gunwales, which I'll fit tomorrow. In the mean time, I've slipped the molds back into place to help maintain the shape. Once the temporary gunwales are fitted, and some spreader sticks installed, I can get on with scraping all that bloody glue off the interior (not looking forward to that).



After this eventful day I sat in the yard with a couple of beers, staring at my new boat and starting to think that it might just work out ok after all. Can't wait until tomorrow....