All's done and glued now. Time for a first layer of epoxy on everything. I first plugged the screw holes in the rails using plugs cut from the rail endpieces. My smallest plug cutter is 3/8 while the countersinks were about 1/4 or perhaps 3/16. I tapered the ends of the plugs with some sandpaper and they ended up roughly fitting into the holes. Then it was on to peanut butter epoxy in each hole, on the plug, then bashing the plug into the hole.
Once the plugs had set (overnight) I planed and sanded the skeg and rails smooth. The plane does an excellent job in evening out the rails and cleaning up the extra epoxy. The hard part, though, is figuring out the direction of the grain. I ended up ripping up several chunks of wood when I was not careful.
Then it was on to one layer of epoxy (~5 pumps were enough for both rails and skeg). I only did two parts of the rails (bottom and side) as the third part (top) still needs to be cleaned up and rounded over. This way I won't need to clean up any epoxy that happens to drip off the edges (hopefully not much).
I would have liked to do a second layer soon after the first, but time is not on my side. I'll do it all about a week later, which means part of the day will be spent sanding the already epoxied parts smooth and cleaning the dust with alcohol. It might be OK anyway as debris fell on the wet epoxy and also the skeg 'outgassed' a bit (despite my best efforts at popping bubbles with a foam brush).
Time: 3 hours
Total: 80 hours
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