Sunday, July 27, 2014

Laminating the Stem

The stem - or, more succinctly, the outer stem - came together rather suddenly yesterday. I spent a couple of hours over last week re-sawing and planing four 1x4s into nine useable 3.5mm thick pieces for the lamination.

And, I watched this series of videos on Laminating the Stem several times. The video answered a basic question I had: How do you glue up so many pieces with all those clamps in the way? (Somewhere I got the notion that the individual pieces were added to the form one at a time…)

So, after applying a finish to a couple of picture frames and a bit of work on the chine, I found myself with time, the stem pieces and no excuses... I decided there's no time like the here and now to glue up the stem.

Following the general guidelines (but not all of the specifics - ( I used waxed paper rather than plastic under the glue-up), the gluing, assembly and clamping went remarkably well. The only real "mix-up" (literally) came when I tried to mix a batch of epoxy that exceeded my scale's capacity and I lost track of the mix. I set that aside and continued on. Later in the day that unused batch had set up nicely - I could have used it but there was no way to know that at the time.

The stem is all clamped up, the epoxy is doing its thing and I plan to leave it in the form for a few days.



In the meantime, work continues on the bottom, planks, spars (and other woodworking projects).

4 comments:

  1. Looks nice Bob! Did you still have a cutout of the stem to guide you with profile?

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    1. Thanks Rik. No, the cutout of the stem went away quite a while ago. I lofted/plotted the profile on the chip board layout table, placed a large finishing nail at each plotted point and screwed blocks at each nail point. The big question is whether I plotted that profile accurately twice. We'll see...

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  2. I have more than a few epoxy pucks around the shop for the same reason.

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    1. Well, this wasn't my first epoxy puck and probably won't be my last...

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