Touching Up the Strips

With the stems finished I had to touch up the strips prior to the final shaping of the hull. There were two things I wanted to do. First, I had a couple of spots where some strips were thinner and I wanted to make them a bit thicker. Secondly, I had to fill in numerous gaps between strips.

There were 7 spots (I think) where I had strips that were too thin. I opted to glue more wood on top of it, which would then be sanded down such that the fillers would add a few mm of thickness. The first spot worked okay. An area next to the stem was a bit of mess, I managed to fill it up a bit to make it fair but it was a bit ugly.

The third area I tried to fix was a bust. After gluing I wasn’t able to fair it out very well. However, I learned something very important. Even though the strip was originally too thin, I was able to fair it into the adjacent strips. First I had to sand off the filler wood that I glued on (which was easy):

I added some fillers to some of my thin AYC accent strips as well. Most of them I later sanded off during the hull shaping.

The last prep step was to fill in a bunch of gaps I experimented with using Dunhams Wood Filler. I had a difficult time color matching the filler with the wrc. I had done several trials but when I finally came to use it on the boat I got the color wrong. I also filled gaps with epoxy thickened with wood flour. I found this to work better, albeit a bit more work. I could match the color better than with the filler. Mixing epoxy with wood flour typically gives a mix that is too dark, so I added some white glass fibers for a better color match.

I masked off all the gaps when using the epoxy and although this takes more time up front, it sure saves a lot of cleanup work. I didn’t mask with Dunhams and that was a bit of a mistake. I found that although the Dunhams sanded really well, the sanding left small bits of powder stuck into the wood.