On the bright side, when it comes to the "gluing" phase of stitch 'n glue construction, sweating the details can also save time sanding. In the bizarre calculus of boatbuilding, three hours spent taping just to save an hour of sanding still somehow counts a saving time. .
I want to do a really nice job on my fillets. I can do a pretty good job free hand, which is what I did on the rudder. But, I wanted to take the fillets on the interior of boat to the next level. As a result, most of my progresses since last report has been spent carefully masking all the soon-to-be-filleted seams on the boat. And there are a lot of seams. Done right, masking them off, applying the fillet, and then removing the tape yields a nice, sharp, clean, straight fillet. Nice, sharp, clean, straight fillet look good and require less sanding. And nice, sharp, clean, straight fillets are what I've decided I want in my boat.
With other things in life competing for my time, the multiple hours of taping (not to mention the multiple rolls of tape) constitute most of the progress I've made.
I suppose I should also mention that I pulled all the stitches out. Combined with removing the stitches from the cradle boat, there were a lot of stitches. A lot. And throughout the process of clipping and pulling hundreds of pieces of wire out of my hull, I couldn't get the famous Beatles lyric, "now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall" out of my head. When I built me Pygmy Opsrey double kayak (which, by the way, had even MORE stitches!), that same phrase ran through my head as I pulled stitches. I'm not really sure what to think about that.
The cradle boat is moving along too. Just like big brother, it is all taped up and awaiting a couple of thickened epoxy fillets. Maybe tomorrow...
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