Petrel Kayak Build - Crafting Durability: Round Chines for Kayak Strength - E13

Hey, welcome back to the Guillemot Kayaks workshop. I'm Nick Schade, this is Bill, and we are working on the Petrel Play SG, a stitch and glue sea kayak kit that Chesapeake Light Craft provided me. This is my design, but they create the kits, and if you're interested in building one of these, you can get the kit from Chesapeake Light Craft, clcboats.com. Previously, we fiberglassed the inside of the deck here, and there are some bits and pieces that we did some fiberglassing on also. So today, I want to just trim the glass out of the deck, we'll put this aside and grab the hull that we glassed on back in episode three or four or something like that, which was over a month ago. Now we, I think, are like five or six days into the build process now. It's been months since we started, but as far as the actual time in the shop, it hasn't been all that long yet. We will again trim the glass on the edge of the deck here, trim the holes where the hatches and cockpit are, then move this aside and grab the hull and glass the exterior of the hull. Before glassing the exterior of the hull, we are going to take and clean up the chines, the joints between the panels. We want to round those over a little bit, and then we will fiberglass. So let's just get to it. So remember, we want to trim right up next to the wood, we don't want to have any loose stuff hanging over. There we go, nicely done.

So, you don't worry about cutting into the wood a little bit? No, you know, you don't want to take big chunks out, but we're running the edge of that blade right up against the wood. There, I just wasn't using enough force. Got to put a little elbow into it. Yeah, it really shouldn't take force; it's getting the angle on it there. You see, yeah, that was no force at all. Right, here we go, there it goes. Yeah, so it's finding that angle. Beyond, yeah, don't worry too much about just getting the where it's wet out get it trimmed off and watch your fingers that you don't end up cutting your fingers. Cutting fingers is bad. Yep, if it's easier, try going the other way. Yeah, it's a little bumpy. Yeah, there are some drips in the epoxy here. You're not worried about getting too close right now. Well, yeah, you know, eventually we want to get nice and close.

Now, before we cut out some of these non-wetted-out spots, do we still want to do that? Yeah, yeah, so just shave those off close. All right, and then the holes here, okay, looks good. So now let's just take this whole thing and put it on the first table where the bits and pieces are. All right, and then let's just get this ugly old piece of cardboard out of the way. So one note about this piece of cardboard, this isn't the best work surface. If you have something better, by all means, use something better. Part of my goal in using this is to show that you didn't actually need fancy equipment or a fancy workbench to do this. We can do it on, you know, pretty minimal equipment. So don't think this is my recommended way of doing it; this is the way I recommend if you have nothing else.

Okay, so this hull looks great. I'll, I'll do some closeups of some of the seams to show you what they should look like, but a few things you might see going on. We've got some drips coming through the stitch holes; sometimes, it drips right through the seams. It looks like here we actually have one of the forms glued down a little bit, but everything looks really excellent. So the first thing we want to do at this point is we've got all these forms on here; we're kind of done with those. So we've got the copper wires here; we can just clip that copper wire and take the form off. Okay, um, so right now, we've got those wires hanging out; we're going to have to deal with that. Go ahead and clip all these wires, get the forms off. So here's the puzzle joints on the bottom, get a little bit of glue weeping through those, but they, they look great. Here's what the edges look like when they're all lined up nicely. We have a little bit of a gap at the end of this steeler; it ends up with a little gap, as you can imagine, right there. But beyond that, the seams are lined up, and they're smooth across there. Looks really good. Down here, we have what the puzzle joint looks like on the outside. That looks great. Here we have a little bit of dripping through a stitch hole. We will have a system for dealing with that, and then down here, we have the wires. Right now, these copper wires are sticking out; they're very sharp. We'll probably poke ourselves and draw blood. Someone had commented on seeing light through the seam up here at the stern, just where these two panels came together. It was hard to get these wires tight enough to block all light. Well, we've got a little bit of the fillet mix squeezed out through there. We'll end up removing that; obviously, no more lights are coming through that. The other thing we're going to do is ease these corners on the chines and the keel line. Basically, any really sharp edge has two problems. Fiberglass doesn't like to wrap around it, and the sharper the edge is, the more likely it is to, when you hit something, that you'll break that edge or mangle it. So by softening that corner a little bit, you actually make the boat stronger and less prone to damage. We've got the chines and the keel line, and then up here at the stem, we've got a little bit of separation between these two panels where the bevel was. We're going to end up sanding, planing, and sanding that down nice and smooth and putting a nice radius on all of that.

So here we have the wires that we're holding the forms on. I should get a shot from the inside showing what that wire looks like on the inside; basically, it's barely visible. There's a couple of solutions we could do here; we could heat this wire up and take a pair of pliers and try and pull it through, but I end up typically just cutting them off and making them flush to the surface. So my process for that, a pair of wire cutters, just cut them off fairly flush. All right, so we have the wires right there. Now I want to file these smooth, down flush to the surface. If I started working on this right now, I'd end up chewing up the plywood all the way around, and that would be ugly. So I'm going to take a piece of masking tape, just put it down over those wires, and punch them through so the wires stick through. This is just a standard four-in-hand shoe rasp, whatever you call it, available at any hardware store. This is a crusty old one. For a little bit of more defense against chewing up the boat, you can take a little bit of masking tape, wrap it around the end, just so part of the rasp you're not paying attention to is protected from doing damage. Then we'll just get down here, go sand them down flush, and take the tape off. So this is sticking up ever so slightly now, basically the thickness of the tape. When we glass over that, they'll disappear. So, think you can do that? I think I can do that. Go for it. All right, here we go.

So, one thing to think about with that rasp, which way does it cut, right? So when you're pushing it, it cuts, right? That makes sense, yeah, yeah. You feel that on the plane, on the rasp cut, I guess? So, yeah, yeah. So it only cuts on the push, on that. So, really, the only part that matters is the push, okay? So you don't need to sort of scrub. So how's that feel? Yeah, like just, yeah, just below the surface. Yeah. That's it. Now we sort of have the drips, so along this edge, for example, we've got these drips of epoxy coming through. And it's sort of the same thing here. Your first inclination on a drip like this is to take a sanding block and go at it with a sanding block. But what's the problem with that? Well, when you tilt the block, you're going to hit the... Yeah, and the sanding blocks tend to be a little bit soft, so it's going to bridge over the drip and sand all this area around it. So I tend to like to use something like a rasp where it's rigid, and that way, I'm just taking the high spot off, right? And we can use that same trick with the tape to just create some protection around the drip. These Four-In-Hand rasps have a fine side and a coarse side, so you can start, get it close with the coarse side, and then when you're down pretty close, and we don't want to plane into the wood, we want to just get that drip until it feels pretty smooth. It doesn't need to be perfect. And again, if you want to do a little bit more, I would want to have something wrapped around the tip of this tool like you do on that one. That way, you know you're going to be focusing on this spot right here, and the tool you're going to be focusing on that spot with the tool instead of ignoring what happens out at the tip here. So by having a little bit of protection out there, you can just knock that down nice and smooth.

So it's going to be the same drill on all of these, and one thing to consider is, you want the tool flat to the surface, right? And so it's hard to do that when you're coming in on this side with the tail end of the tool down against that flat surface. You know, adjust your posture so you can come comfortably doing... Oh yeah, this is much easier on this side. Yeah, we just want to be aware of what we're cutting beyond the drip here. We... It's not a big deal because we are going to be rounding over this keel line eventually. But just, you know, be aware and make sure you're not, you know, if we start to dig holes out here, they never go away. There's not a way to make them go away. It's not that the boat's ruined, but cosmetically, you can't make that go away. I think you can come down a little bit more... More? Yeah, make it so basically, it feels like this is just a piece of paper sticking up. Don't go too far without looking, just so if you start to scratch into something, you want to be aware of it. All right, I don't know, hard to get any further. Yeah, that's good. It takes a little bit of practice. So you get the other side, and we'll go ahead and do all the drips on the boat.

Yeah, one reason I bring up the which-direction-that-cuts discussion is because if you're going here and you're doing the scrubbing thing, yeah, it's easy. You, you start to just get into a motion, right? Where you want to be intentional each time, each stroke. So by doing this... Okay, I can look, I can look. Right, what do I need to do? I was noticing that I can angle this. If this is the high spot and angle it on spot... And, and if you're doing this, you don't know what's happening. You can't, you don't get any feedback. So doing it on the push stroke, the way it cuts, you'll give yourself an opportunity to look at it each time and be very intentional on every time you're doing something, what exactly is it you're trying to do.

Like this one here, it's hard to get at because this, there's a little bit of a lip right there. Yeah, so knock the lip down, or just leave it alone. So there's a little bit of a ledge right here. We are going to end up again rounding this keel line over a little bit. So this area will take will be knocked back a little bit. So we'll have an opportunity to clean up any mess we have there. So I'd say again, we're carefully on that spot. We can be a little bit more aggressive as far as hitting this edge here. And again, like I say, each stroke you do, be intentional. This is what I'm trying to remove. That's where I'm concentrating my effort, and do that until it's down pretty low. We've got some spots here that are in the middle of the surface, which are going to be harder to get down flat. Another tool we can use, can use a little block plane. You see, I'm just sort of shaving the top of that off. I'm not making big strokes at all, just starting and ending right. Yeah, I'm pairing it, you know, I'm... I'm getting up against the glue and then, you know, intentionally slicing through that. So I'm not doing a motion, I'm doing a task, right? Which, you know, it's sort of easy to get in the mode of, okay, sanding is this, planing is this, right? When you're just using this more like a knife, right? I'm... This is a knife and a nice holder, so I can use that to get in right there and shave the top off. See, if I were to use this tool right now, I'd need to hold it fairly flat here, and the teeth on this end stick down a lot farther than the teeth at this end. So if I'm concentrating up here while I'm doing it, it... I'm probably scratching back here. We'll work on that some more. But there's something to think about.

Yeah, this is that thing where you're concentrating on this... Got that... And so part of that is again, that you know, one stroke at a time, and I... I will tend to put my hand on the front end of the, the, the rasp. Well, yeah. And so I'm thinking about getting the pressure onto the drip, right? I'm actually holding it back with this other hand, you know? So I'm pushing against that, and that way, I can really concentrate on the drip itself and not have the tool run away from me if something catches. So here we have a little bit of squeeze-out. This is the filling mix that we pressed on the inside here, and it came out through a gap here and just leaves a little bit of a shelf of gunk there. We basically just want to get rid of that; it's... It's sticking out, essentially, just at that seam. So if we hold our... Our rasp, not flat to this surface, not flat to this surface, but halfway in between. All right, so now I've brought that down tight to the seam, and there's a little bit of stuff left over, but we're going to come back and do all these seams to round them over a little bit, but that just knocks that little shelf down and in... In a separate operation. So we can do the same thing over here on this side. Just bring that down, that little bit. So again, not flat to one surface or flat to the other surface but halfway in between.

All right, we got a couple of places at the other end. All right, so here it's starting to flatten out a little bit, and we want to avoid cutting into the stain. Yeah, it's not the end of the world if we do, and I don't think we need to do much there. But just to think about, since the... The rasp is really stiff. As long as you don't have it parallel to that surface or this surface, there's no way the rasp is going to cut either of those surfaces, as long as you're keeping that angle. There's not a lot there. There's a couple of drips here; we can touch briefly. But we're looking good.

Far enough down, or you need to go more? Yeah, let's bring that down some more if we can. More? Sometimes it's a... An angle thing. I don't know if we can get in from here, you know, going this direction. And so instead of going purely across, I can sort of glide down that seam a little bit. All right, and again, I'm... I'm trying to keep it, so I'm not flat on either surface, and the seam rolls a little bit as move down the length. We're starting to get some scratches on there from going across it.

So I think we'll stop right there. So the next thing we want to do is start to round over the keel line. And like I said, it's actually kind of a durability thing. If you leave this edge really sharp, it takes the slightest hit to damage that edge. Where if you've got a bit of a radius, you know, you won't have the concentrations of hits on that spot. The first thing we want to do is again, holding this tool halfway between here and there. So, on the case of the keel line, keep the bottom of the tool perfectly level and work down the seam to break that edge. When you're, if you're using a block plane, we want to make a pretty fine cut. Generally, what people do, they think that they need to make it, you know, it's not cutting for them, so they take the blade, and they crank it out, and make it cut deeper. If you're having trouble with it cutting, chances are the plane is dull; sharpen it. If you haven't sharpened it today, it's probably dull. If you haven't sharpened it this week, it's very likely dull. If you've never sharpened it at all, it is dull, guaranteed. If you bought it yesterday and you haven't sharpened it, and it's a plane like this, it's dull. It needs to be sharpened. I won't go into sharpening, but there's plenty of YouTube videos on that. You want a sharp tool to make this anything resembling fun. So in this process, we're going to plane it down until the width of the flat spot we're creating here, this flat spot right here, is about a quarter-inch, something like 6 mm. So we're going to do the whole seam so we get a quarter-inch-wide flat spot right there at that seam, do the whole seam like that. Then once you've got that quarter inch, you can take and slightly angle. So this was halfway between this angle and this angle. We want to make the next one halfway between that flat spot and the panel next to it. We never want to stick the plane down flat against the panel because we will start gouging into the whole panel, so we're going to keep the edge up off that panel and just knock the corner on either side to make a nice radius there. These drips are going to be a little bit in the way. Let's not worry about those. We're just going to try and make this spot there a quarter inch wide and that we might start getting into some epoxy and so forth when we do that. So now that spot there about a quarter inch wide, and generally we'll do the whole length of the seam and then come by and just a couple of strokes to knock the corner off. That way, we have a nice radius there.

Oh yeah, the most sensitive tool you have to know if this is good is your hand. So, if I run across here, it feels smooth. If I run across here, I have a definite edge right there on that flat spot, I was making up here, it's quite sharp. We'll do the whole bottom seam that way. Then, we'll talk about the side seams.

Talking quickly about planes here, I've had this plane for probably 40 years. It's a Stanley low angle block plane with an adjustable mouth. You can still buy these; they're not quite as good as they were made 40 years ago. I'm not sure what the price of these are, but they're probably in the $50 range something like that.

This plane, also made by Stanley, I bought maybe five years ago for eight bucks, maybe with inflation it's 10 bucks now. It's a piece of crap, but if you sharpen it and get it well adjusted, it'll do the job. It's not sharp when you bought it, and it's not adjusted when you bought it. You want to set it up so it's taking a fairly shallow cut, which that is too deep. The reason this is so cheap is it's hard to adjust.

So, let's go ahead and get that whole seam, we're just going to go down the keel line for now, making a quarter-inch wide flat spot straight down the key line. Far forward on this bow, should I, we'll go all the way until it starts to really drop off. We'll end up doing the ends as a separate operation. We want that same quarter inch all the way to the end. We're actually going to do it more than a quarter inch as we get closer to the end.

But let's go for the full quarter inch for now. One thing to keep in mind with the block plane, yep, the feeling is we've got to keep it straight along. We can skew it off to the side. As far as holding the angle, it's really hard to maintain that flat angle when it's straight. So, if we skew it a little bit, it's easier to see that we're holding that angle, and then it makes a slicing cut, which a lot of block planes actually work better with that slice and cut.

Alright, I'm not sure how far down you want to go. Right there, yeah, that's enough for now. All right, and then we just knock that corner off both sides and get that rounded over. Yeah, that's good for now. Good.

Okay, so the next operation is the chines, which is essentially the exact same thing we just did, but now instead of having the plane horizontal, we need to think more about halfway between the two panels. Again, we're going to try for like a quarter-inch wide, and now we're getting into our stain. So, we need to be more aware of what we're doing to that.

We have a fairly easy situation right here. It goes from the light to the dark. If we end up planing away a little bit of the dark, and we make that a nice even straight line along there, when we get to our 1/4 inch wide, which will be an eighth of an inch into the color, we won't have to do anything to fix that because we made a nice straight line, straight even line.

So, one thing to think about, if you're planning to stain your boat, is stuff like this up here at the bow of the boat. This is really flat. So, there we can't make a quarter-inch wide spot there because it's flat. There is a place right here where we have a little bit of an overhang. There's a little bit of an overhang here, but we're going to work on rounding this stem over to give it a really good radius.

If you remember, we've got a fillet up in here. The fillet of thickened epoxy comes back to about, you know, is about this deep in here. We'll talk more about this later. But there's a lot of room for planing this back. The fear, I know, for a lot of people when they're planing these edges, the keel, and the chines is they think they're going to go through the boat. Well, again, if we keep it to the quarter-inch wide along this seam, you're not going to get all the way through the boat with a quarter-inch wide little flat spot. And you know, up at the ends, on this keel line, you were worried about how much to do here probably, worried about taking too much off. That fillet comes way, you know, is almost this deep. You know, we can flip over the boat later and look and see how deep that fillet is, but we've got a lot of room to maneuver there.

So, on these seams, we're again just going to split the difference. And that squeeze out we had there, we're starting to hit that again. So, we're just going to split the difference. So, I have my fingers hanging down on either side of my plane here to feel that it's not flat against that. So, yeah, I'm not scrubbing here, I'm just one cut at a time. What does it need? And that feels good. And we're looking for a smooth seam there. That quarter inch wide is probably a good guideline, but if it feels smooth, it is smooth. Just go down the whole thing again, looking for that 1/4 inch wide spot. And this, the angle, rolls as we go along. So, again, if I have my fingers hanging over the edge there, I can gauge that it's equal on both sides. So, we'll do the whole quarter inch, so these two seams, by the time they get back here, they become one seam. And so, we'll continue with that nice quarter-inch wide spot there, and then do that, knock the corners off and make a nice rounded surface. Okay, yeah, it really doesn't take much wood. You're not taking a whole lot of wood off there; it's a fairly smooth curve already.

Oops, planing down a little at the wrong angle.

Yeah, very satisfying about using a plane, isn't it? You know, one of the downsides of it is it's so satisfying people don't want to stop sometimes, and that can cause problems. They just enjoy themselves so much that they can start eating deeper in. So again, the idea of being intentional each time you touch the plane to the boat. So, what am I doing when I make this cut, and why am I doing it? And then see if you did it, and if you did it, you've got to stop. Leave it alone.

Alright, let's break for lunch. So, after lunch, we'll work some more on the stems here. We'll be fairly aggressive on the stems. Then we can decide even on the keel line back here how much we want to take off. Again, the more you abuse the boat, probably the more you want to take off. Just a nice rounded surface there will be stronger and more durable, and also you have a little bit of a chance to adjust your performance. Basically, this is acting as some skeg back here.

Okay, same at the front. If you want more maneuverable, take more off, and just a change of a quarter inch back here all the way, you know, your 14ft boat, you're 7 feet from the paddler back here. That makes a huge difference. Just a small change back here will make a huge difference in the performance. It's not going to completely change the boat, but if you want more maneuverable, take more off; if you want straighter tracking, take less off. So, depending on what you're going to, your intended use of the boat, you may want to take more or less. Yeah, so playing in rock gardens, having it rounded over just for hitting stuff is better. Taking more off is better because it's more maneuverable.

Alright, we took a break for lunch at this point. The keel and the chines are rounded over. What we want to do is work on the stems here. We want to put a nice radius on there. And if we look inside here, the fillet here, you see, comes back to here. If you look at the stitch holes here, here's the stitch holes. They're about a 1/2 inch in from the edge. The fillet more than covers those stitch holes. They're well past the stitch holes. So that's in the way of saying we could plane this face down here as far as the stitch holes and not come anywhere near cutting all the way through the boat.

So we want to start working this face down, and that 1/2 quarter inch we talked about before was probably the minimum we want to get down until we see the epoxy between these two panels of wood. And we want to make that a nice straight line. So, the plane here makes it that nice and straight. And then up here, we've already sort of planed this area. We need to make this transition around the knuckle. You could try to hold the plane all the way around, but it's hard to keep it engaged. So, I will tend to make a flat spot, then make another flat spot, and another one. And sort of like we made the quarter-inch wide here and then knocked the corners off. We're kind of doing the same thing here, making a flat spot and then knocking the corners off between those various flat spots.

We have a little bit of a gap where the filling mix didn't fill all the way in there, and we have a little bit of an overhang here, particularly on this side. So we want to start knocking that down, make it even with the surface. We may end up cutting into the veneers there and get a little bit of a discoloration. But again, we want to hold this tool, so we're kind of splitting the difference between this face and this face, and just make that nice and smooth on both sides. And then continue working on that, trying to make a nice, a sweet curve transitioning from the keel line here down to the stem.

And you see here, the stitch holes. They're still nearly a 1/2 inch away from where we've cut, so we have room to go. For the ease of fiberglassing, it does help to have a real big radius there. It lets the fiberglass wrap more easily. I'm finding places where the fillet we put in there is left a gap, the plywood. I'm cutting it down, so I get to that fillet. Don't have to go that deep. We could come back in later, put a little bit more fillet from this side, but we have enough material here that we can carve into that a bit.

So again, I'm trying to make a nice sweet curve here, and right now, there's a little bit of a knuckle right there. And that's looking good. Once we have sort of that shape, we can now start knocking the corners off this to get that radius around that stem. And again, run your hand over it, feel for rough spots, and that's the idea for the stems.

This is still a little sharp up there. I'm going to knock it down some more, make it a little bit more maneuverable as well, and then we'll sand that. That's the basic idea. You want to do that on the pointy end? Sure, we want to just make a nice straight line down here first. I sort of just go straight line from here all the way to the end. Then we can work on refining that. And so I hold it square to the line of the bolt, but you can skew it. But we want us that flat spot kind of square. Now we're getting down to where the fillet is. Yeah, we got room to go still more. That's looking pretty good.

We've got a bit of a gap in the fillet back up in here, which we could fill later. Let's work on getting the yes, blending this keel line down into that. I think we could remove some more material here. It's pretty fine up here, so you know, start there. Start there, and then you know, hack away at it a bit. Is that wide enough there, or would you have it wider?

I'd go a little bit wider. Basically, we're to the point where we see the full width of both pieces of plywood here. They're touching here. We're seeing a little bit of the fillet here. We're starting to see a little bit of where the fillet should be. Let's get a good view of the fillet in there. Okay, and again, the rounder this is, the more durable it will be.

The stitch holes here are well buried in the fillet on the inside, so we have plenty of room to go cut into this before we're anywhere near cutting through the boat. Yeah, that's looking good. Yeah. Yeah, there's a bit of an open spot here and here, where the fillet didn't get all the way down in there. We might want to squeeze some stuff in there just to make it solid. You know, the epoxy will run in there a bit, but we don't want sort of a hollow spot in there that'll hold water or anything like that, right?

Right, let's start to round that over. We have a little bit of an overhang over here. Just this panel is overhanging this panel a little bit, so it's not perfectly smooth. By the time we reach here, they are. It's just a little bit of an overhang right there. So we might want to, which this is cutting into that color, yep, but we can't really leave this overhang. The glass is not going to conform to that. So we want to, you know, cut off as little as we possibly can. You see, the color comes off immediately. You think stain soaks deep into the wood. It's really very much on the surface.

And maybe we'll hit that with a little bit of sanding because this plane doesn't quite reach in there. Alright, so that's pretty close, and you see I started to mar up here a little bit. So I want to stop now. We can work on rounding this whole thing over, which is knocking the corners off on both sides all the way around, and get a nice radius onto that. Alright, all the way back here.

Yeah, a little too far up there. That's all right. Yeah. Yeah, is that round enough? Run your hand over it. Yeah, it's kind of not so great. Do you think? We got a bit of an edge here. I would say you're taking more off the sides than you are off the ends. So you're kind of making it a point as opposed to a radius. Does that make sense to you? Can you sort of see that?

Yeah, I see what you're saying. So, you've taken more than enough off the sides. It's getting it, so it's a nice continuous curve, not a knife edge. Yeah, we don't want the knife edge. That's what we're trying to avoid. I just want to make sure I've got the same stain color here as we used before. I don't remember what we used. Had to go watch the video. So, I found light brown mahogany, but we used medium brown mahogany. You serious? See if I can find the medium brown mahogany. I actually marked the bottle.

Alright, where are we at? See, you think. Yeah, let's hit that with, well, there's a little bit of an edge you feel right here. Oh, yeah. Yeah, feel it now. It's never about removing a lot of wood, okay? You know, it's about just removing the wood that needs to be removed to get the shape we're looking for. So, there's a pretty deep gap happen here. Just that's a matter of pushing the fillet mix well down in there when we were working on the inside. So, I'm going to go ahead and wack it down till we're hitting the fillet in there.

Alright, again, you know there is a fillet up in here. It's a little bit. I've gone past the marks there, and that's about as far as I want to go. So now, I'm just going to round that over a bit, and we'll mix up a little bit of material and smear it in there. Just want to make that blend in.

Alright, I went way too far on here. The key to it is feeling for an edge there and then trying to run the plane down that edge that you feel. And it's not about tapering the side so much as, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got carried away there. Getting it's okay; there's plenty of meat there. I think that's in good shape there. We will end up injecting a little bit of thickened epoxy up in there.

Okay, so we want to sand this whole thing. And again, we want to be extremely careful on the colored section. Basically, this is 120 grit sandpaper I have on here. If I go over this once, it's probably okay; twice, I will start to remove color. We want to think about what direction we're sanding. Since it's a fairly coarse sandpaper, we're not trying to make this a fine finish, but we don't want to make scratches across the grain. So, we want to run with the grain and sweeten up these places that we planed. If you look at them now, they're a little bit shiny because the plane cut it really fine. So, we want to take and clean those areas up, go over the whole flat surface, get rid of some of the remaining nubs, some of the remaining drips.

But we sort of just once over on everything; we're not trying to make this a piano. And then at the end, we'll sweeten up that shape a little bit. And for now, with these, let's not hit the color at all, okay? And we'll come back and address the color separately. But let's just go ahead and do the whole thing.

Let's—yeah. So running our hand over things here just to feel for any sort of sharp spots, any rough spots, is a good strategy. Why don't we take now and vacuum off the dust?

So, we've got the bare wood all sanded. Now we would like to scuff up the surface of the epoxy-covered and stained wood. Again, this is just to sort of de-gloss it and give the new epoxy, when we fiberglass it, some tooth to stick to. So, I've got a Scotch-Brite pad here. I'm just going to go over the whole thing, trying to take off some of that gloss. So, that does a pretty good job of taking the gloss off of there. You can see there's still a little bit of gloss on the video, but it's got a bit of a dull sheen to it now.

We've got a couple of spots here that we want to do a little fine-tuning on. We have this spot here where we had to plane that down in order to get it to blend in, and there's still a little bit of an overhang here. So, I'm going to take and lightly sand away at that, trying to get that to blend in a little bit more. I'm trying to be careful and not sand into the stain below it. Having a good stiff, firm face on your sanding block helps, so it doesn't conform over the edge. And see, there's still a little bit of an overhang there, but it's a lot better.

And then we've got a drip right here, right on that flat surface. That's hard to address with the rasp here; you might be able to get some of that being very careful not to score up this area here. So let's protect that a lot. You see, I'm tending to hit there, so I have a little scraper here. See if I can come up that drip. Want to be careful. If I end up hopping off the end of the drip there, I'll end up gouging into the wood. So, I want to hold back so I'm not just dropping off that end. I'm not going to make it perfect; the glass will go over it. Just make it so there's not an obvious bump.

So, we've taken the stain off there. We want to fix that. We have an aesthetic choice here. We've taken the stain all off the stem here. If we had a really nice crisp line here, we could just say, "That looks cool." Yeah, and so it's a decision we have to make. How cool do we think it looks? Since we have this patch here, I'd say let's re-stain that hole there. Just do the whole thing. Yeah, so we need to differentiate between the places where we've sanded the stain completely off and these light spots where it looks lighter because we've sanded into the epoxy.

Because you might think, "Okay, this is light here; we want to darken it." But there's plenty of stain there; it's under the epoxy, right? If we add more stain, then we make a dark spot there. Right. So, we want to just touch the area where it needs retouching but not beyond.

So, we want to re-stain this area. So we could take and just soak a rag like last time, use that to wet it out. You know, if I spread stain beyond this light edge, I will get a dark spot there. I want to pretty much just put the stain where it's needed. So, to do that, I like a little brush, and my brusher choice for stain is just a Q-tip. So, I'm going to take and apply the stain just where it's needed, and then wipe off the excess. And it may end up looking a little bit lighter. It's important to remember that we don't have epoxy over this. So the epoxy makes it appear darker. So it should look a little lighter when there's no epoxy over it.

A couple of scratches right there, I might go with a little bit more there. If I had a place between two panels, a long strip where the color had been taken off, again, I'd use a Q-tip and run down that strip. And I'm going to use a little bit of the natural alcohol and just use that to even things out a little bit. So that takes care of those patches. And this does look lighter here. Let's see what it looks like when it's wet. Yeah, it's still a little bit lighter when it's wet. Let's go with a little bit more stain there. Basically, the places where there's epoxy is what it looks like when I...

Alright, so, you know, it's hard to make that spot disappear completely. So we do our best when we're assembling the plywood panels back on day one or two to make sure there's no overhangs there. So, all that time we spent feeling those edges and trying to align things, part of what we were trying to do is eliminate the need to do a patch right there.

That said, if we had chosen to stain the whole hull, all the panels, and then we went and sanded them to round them over, we are going to end up with a light stripe on each one, right? So, you have to go through and touch them up. So when you're choosing your staining pattern, that's something to think about—how much you want to go through and patch that up. Yep. So that is the process of patching up the stain.

So I think I'll call that an episode. We spent a couple of hours this morning just getting the hull ready to be fiberglassed. In the next episode, we'll finish up the fiberglassing, starting with filling up the stems, the gaps in the stems, and then going ahead and doing the fiberglassing. That won't take too long. It'll probably be a shorter episode, but this episode's getting pretty long.

So I think this series, working with Bill, is working out well. Having him here, working on the boat, has helped me sort of address what I think might be some of your concerns by seeing what his concerns are. And I hope it's working out well for you. So, if you're enjoying this series and want to see more of this content, hit notifications. That will let you know when the next episode comes out. I'm putting them out once a week, approximately. So once again, let's do all that YouTube stuff. Notifications, subscriptions, hit like, share this video. And if you'd like to directly support, I have a Patreon site; the link will be in the description. So until the next episode, thanks for watching and happy paddling.