Monday, December 4, 2017

Redux

After I realized that several things were going less-than-optimally, I decided (somewhat painfully) to start over again, from the design.
I widened the bow and stern entries on the design, so that I can actually strip to the forms. I also reduced the upturn of the ends, so I don't have to deal with such a "mad" curve.
I'm going to use an internal stem this time, because I don't like joining the ends of the strips past the bow & stern. It also prevents the mistake of gluing the form to the boat.
I'm probably not going to have enough strips, but I can deal with making more strips easier than I can deal with the number of mistakes that have piled up.
I went back into Kayak Foundry, and reshaped the bow & stern entries to be a little less "fine". I wondered if I could re-use the middle forms, then thought better of it, and remade all the forms. As I expected, forms 1 and 15 came out wider.
Planning an internal stem posed a problem-how to mark the taper? In the past, the plan had included a convenient line. This time, I used a strip long enough to span forms 1 and 2, or forms 14 and 15 to gauge the taper, making sure that it would run fair off the end of the stem. The taper I ended up with looked good, quite a bit like the taper of my Outer Islands.
A new way of dealing with the "cheater" strips occurred to me.
I glued in one full-length strip, with a little curve at the ends, and let it run straight out the end.
I then filled the gap with Cheater Strips. This was much easier than the way I used to do it-putting the cheaters down first, then the full-length strips on top. I wish I had thought of this years ago!

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