Dust Storm

Today was a dedicated kayak construction day. I started early by picking up various sand paper grits (80, 120, 220) from Lowes and launched right into sanding the hull exterior. In addition to smoothing out the plywood another big component of sanding is rounding over the junctions where the bottom panels meet the side panels to create seamless transitions. 

Rounding over the seams only gets you so far, though, because the seam where the two panels meet will still have valley. It's important not to round over too much as this would cut into the wood significantly. 

You can see from this diagram the valley between the two panels. In this example, the outside of the boat is the side with the twisted copper wire. I previously had removed all the twisted copper wire. So to help create the rounded seams I filled the seams with epoxy thickened with wood powder (same concoction as the interior fillets). For neatness I masked the seams prior to spreading the paste into the seams. That's what you see here....

I pulled off the masking tape right after the seams were filled. I'm going to let the epoxy harden over night and then it's back to sanding smooth and rounding over.