Panels

It's been a busy last 10 days or so, with not much happening on the build last week.  Brian spent some time fairing stringers and planing to the finished form, while I took athletes to Oklahoma City for US National Team Trials.  I'm pleased to report that two Twin Cities Paddlesports athletes qualified for the Jr National Team!  You will be able to read about that on tcpaddlesports.com.
Meanwhile, we started the next stage of the build - paneling. We've opted for 4mm Okoume plywood, sourced here in the Twin Cities from Midwest Boat Appeal.  They are reasonable, and a pleasure to do business with.
Tonight was a big night for us.  We finished fairing and planing, and called it 'good enough'.  It's level, it's tight, and it's faired well within the bounds of a little thickened epoxy.
We started out by pulling patterns for the side panels.  Probably not an absolute requirement, but for the cost of roll of rosin paper, it makes things so much easier.



 Marking out approximate lines makes it a lot easier to trim and move on to the next steps.  We were careful to get it straight, with no baggy spots or twists, but we didn't try to get it exact.   We stayed about 1" proud on the lines.
 Next, we layed out our plywood for both left and right hulls, overlapped for the scarf, and used a batten to clean up our penciled lines.  Trim the paper back to the 1" plus line, and then run a pencil to the wood. 
 We free-handed the cuts on the tablesaw, and trimmed the excess on the bandsaw, still ensuring that we are a little proud.

The final step for tonight was test hanging the panels.Just simply clamping them on to check our fairing and see how things looked was a huge deal for us.  Tomorrow will be final trim and scarfing day.  

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