Today I got a lot less time than I had previously expected and did not manage to do much. First of all, my trusty drill bit with countersink had gotten dirtied by epoxy at some point earlier in the process and I spent a fair amount of time trying to clean it up. I ended up leaving it alone and slowly drilling the pilot holes and countersinking them by hand. Took a lot longer, and the kicker is... the silly contraption unstuck itself without any help as soon as I no longer needed it.
Clamping the breasthooks to the stems was quite a pain as I was trying not to damage the boat too much... It all worked out in the end and now they are all nicely glued as you can see from the picture below. I also used a bit more of the 'mustard' epoxy to glue the strengthening parts to the rudder stock. I'm not fully confident I put down enough epoxy as there was not much squeeze-out, but given the large surface area I'll probably be fine.
I also figured out that the best way to clean up squeezed-out epoxy is with a putty knife or an old credit card. Works much better than a rag (with or without alcohol on it). You can always follow up with alcohol if you want it really clean, but simply scraping the half-gelled epoxy with a credit card leaves you with a clean enough surface.
Here's the stern with my two helpers. The more I stare at the boat the more it looks like it's a bit off kilter (perhaps twisted). I imagine part of it is an optical illusion due to the the reflections off the epoxy. Even if it is slightly off, I have to remind myself that the weight of a backpack off-center will have a much bigger impact on the boat's attitude in the water, so it should all be fine in the end...
Time: 2 hours (you should be able to do it much faster but I spent a lot of time fidgeting with my countersink bit and the stem clamps).
Total: 63 hours
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