Today I got out of a work meeting and ended up doing more on the boat than I originally expected. I managed to actually glue up the first set of rails!! The process was not too painful - I expected to have difficulties bending the mahogany rails but they bent quite OK. The main problem is the usual 'you can never have enough clamps' issue.
So here's the first picture with 32 spring clamps and 10 C-clamps.
That was still not enough as in some places the edge of the plywood was not quite tight against the rail. My solution was to take a 3 hour break between gluing the two sides of the boat. Once the glue has set a bit I could borrow some clamps from the other side...
Note that it takes ~ 1 hour per side just to glue it and clean after yourself. I'm sure one could do it faster, but the first time you do it it pays to be careful. I used my trusty credit card to carefully clean up the rails. Also, I froze the chip brush in between rails (freezing essentially stops the curing process so you don't have to throw away to brush...not yet). Just for reference, it took me ~5 pumps worth of epoxy to cover one side. There's a fair amount of squeeze-out but still some spots where I'm not sure there was enough glue. I'm still not sure how much epoxy to put down, hopefully what I did was enough.
Here's another look at the new rails
I also got a few minutes to start working on shaping the rudder and daggerboard. I tried using a block plane but it turns out that the process works better with a sander. I only have an orbital sander and that's not too painful (~10-15 minutes/edge). A belt sander would likely make this job a lot faster.
Next step... patch the screw holes then install the next rail. I'm getting closer to the end product.
Time: 4 hours
Total: 67 hours
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