Fillets with self-made wood flour.

In short: don't. looks like crap, the stuff is full of longer fibers, i don't know. Ah well. Sanding is my second nature by now.
(pro tip: use peel ply or PE foil for fillets - they will come out smooth and blush free whatever the filler. I should remember that myself)

Otherwise busy plating the turn of the bilge now. Will report when finished.

Torture at the turn of the bilge

The forward section of the turn of the bilge is a tough cookie. The 10mm plywood needs to be bent and twisted (aka tortured) to conform to a relatively small radius at the E frame while following the water lines. When making the E frame I made the bilge radius quite small knowing it might be a problem, but I wanted to avoid the narrow-nosed variant of the setka I have seen in many other blogs. I prefer my hard chined boats curvy where possible 😉

I tried to minimize the curvature along the water lines by widening the nose and introducing a significant curvature of the bilge piece at the stem to minimize the undevelopability of the piece. As I noted before, The Design is wonderfully vague on the specifics of the forward section so I took all the liberties I felt needed...

First try was to see if the plywood would bend just like that. I clamped the lower edge to the chine log using a beam and I shimmed the sligtly concave middle section to apply a bit more pressure where I could not put a clamp. The board would not budge. It did break though, at the shim, not even where it was being bent. Those pesky forces popping up where you don't expect them...

Second time around I screwed the lower edge with shiny 5mm wide-thread screws (spaced 6cm apart) to make sure the forces were distributed evenly and clamped the whole thing like before. I have put wet towels on the boards to soften them up a bit and slowly started applying pressure.

After 6 hours of slowly inching it in it was done. I will leave the whole thing to air dry under pressure and will keep the plates clamped for at least a few days while I'm doing other stuff.
The other stuff was, and will be for the next couple of days the oh so glorious cleanup of the fillets, cleaning them, sanding them, (re-)applying them, not to mention washing them with luke warm water. So many things one can do with one's time.

In most cases it is purely esthetic, but there are a few spots where not enough resin was squeezed out to make a fillet and I'd like to have nicely rounded edges everywhere - easier to clean and less moisture related problems.
ciao.

The lower chine story

In the last post I showed my attempt at steam bending the chine logs - it kinda worked, but only just kind of. The spruce proved super tough and resistant to bending so I had to figure out a way to reduce the internal stresses in the glue joints. Instead of forcing the log into place I decided to glue in an intermediary wedge. In addition, the gluing surface is more than doubled, see pictures below. The cut angles are euivalent to a 12:1 scarf, which should be aok since i'm relying on glued scarf joints in many places of the build.

In order to keep everything lined up I first glued the logs to the stem and the first bulkhead. Afterwards, making sure the center line is kept I glued the logs to the slots in the rest of the frames. Most probably I will only add fasteners at the stem and the transom, I see little reason to break the continuity of the fibers amidship where it matters.

Keeping the log twisted the correct amount with plywood wrenches makes for a pretty easy fit, no need to use fasteners and weaken the stringers.

 Part of the reason the bending process was so challenging was that the stem sagged by 15mm. Or maybe I put it lower to compensate for the fact I cut it a bit short on the deck side and then forgot about it. Anyway, I laminated 2 strips of wood to the logs to compensate for that, restoring the geometry and adding some additional strength to the forward section.

Next step, tomorrow, will be shaping the bottom chines and fine tuning the bevels.
ahoy.