Alan, Matt, and I tried to sleep in a little this morning, but all of the orphans died when Lizzie was barking this morning and that made it hard to stay asleep (later they came back to life when i drank some coffee and we got down to work) so we got ready and left the house at about eleven.
After a brief trip to Home Depot, we arrived at the warehouse where we discovered normal human beings eating lunch. We got straight to work taking the clamps off (and screws out) of the boats and trimming the excess plywood from the edge. For this task we used the router with a roundover bit to follow the profile of the side panel.
The curvature of the deck caused the trimmed deck to overlap an eighth of an inch on all sides, so we used block planes to fair up the edge and long sanding boards to round off the edge. Once everything was smooth, we filled all the screw holes and sanded down the entire deck and the top edge of the side panels so that they would accept epoxy well.
Mike's dad stopped by to have a look at our progress and he brought us some animal crackers, so we ate lunch. Afterwards, I got back to sanding and fairing down the second boat. Matt and Alan began to do the necessary modifications to his Hobie 18 Trailer- basically installing a secondary frame of long 2x4s and carpeted purlins to support the much longer than eighteen-foot Wa'Apa hulls.
After a break for dinner (cooked by my dad, who used a lot of creativity) (it was delicious), we began finishing the deck - one coat of epoxy, which we let cure until it was tacky; a second coat; and quickly thereafter, fibreglass tape on all the seams in the deck surface and along the joint at the gunwales; and then a sort-of-third-coat to wet out the fibreglass.
Sometime in the middle of this process, we ran out of the marinepoxy which Chuck sent us and were forced to use some of the West Systems epoxy Alan had on hand. Our consensus is that we like the marinepoxy better - it's more transparent, smells better, and is less runny. The West Systems stuff (besides being yellow tinted) had an annoying habit of running off the edge of the boat and onto the dropcloth or our feet rather than staying where we put it.
At any rate, we finished the decks about 1:30 AM and cleaned up. We also celebrated with a round of ginger snaps!
Today we listened to (not necessarily in this order): Mon Frere, The Shins, Jump Little Children, The Faint, The Slits, Eisley, The Cramps, Zao, Johnny Cash, and Broken Social Scene. According to the ancient sages, you sand faster when you are listening to loud music.
