Work on the canoe has been going pretty slowly in January. I've been running a lot more these days and it takes up time on the weekend. The coming Presidents' Day long weekend should be productive. Tracy has promised to help me with fiberglassing the inside on Saturday, Valentine's Day. Now that is true love! And I've got an appointment with Andy in Santa Cruz on Monday to machine the gunwales. After calling a couple places, I haven't been able to find any Ash or Cherry boards longer than 14 feet so I will have to scarf together a couple to get the full length of the canoe. I'll try to get some from Minton's on Saturday even though they never called me back about getting longer boards. The guy at Jackel in Watsonville was good about getting back to me, but Minton's is less than a mile away.
Since flipping the canoe over I have scraped and sanded the inside. I tried with my cabinet scrapers first, but whether it was my technique or the scrapers, it wasn't getting the job done, especially on the epoxy globs that had seeped through the staple holes. So following the advice of countless people on the Bear Mountain builders' forum I ordered a Pro-Prep scraper. It was much more effective although I still found it difficult to get as nice shavings as I do from a plane. Sharpening the Pro-Prep with my diamond block gave a super-sharp edge for slicing through the epoxy. The image after scraping is above. I have also sanded and it looks a thousand times better now, but I don't have a photo yet.
2 comments:
haha, i first read it as "machine gunning whales" :)
You mean you've never machine gunned whales in Santa Cruz? Dodging the Greenpeace boats makes it tricky. :-P
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