Stems, very woody!

Alright! June 20, 2001 already! Time freakin' flies! In 3 days my Pop and I will be in Mystic, Conn. at the biggest wooden boat show on the East coast! We will just be shopping around, and passing out business cards for myself. I'm gonna bring one of my boards along and see if anyone is interested in my work. So I have been out in the shop polishing "The Wormhole" for the show so she looks pretty, only to sand her again later and spray varnish her for the next show! LOL I'm never happy! That blush in the epoxy is pissing me off! All that work and it's cloudy. LOL




Okee Doke, well, while Im upstairs, my dad is downstairs putting the stems in. Here he's got the stem on the vice and he is planing the stem to a 3/8" wide point that will eventually be covered with 1/4 round brass strip.



Here he is fitting the stem in place, we made a few few errors that will cost us some points on looks by overplaning the flats for the stems. We sort of did it while we were still planking the hull to make room for the newest glued planks. Oh, well, lesson learned. Basically we filled the gap with epoxy and sawdust, that was too dark, but alas, it will look OK I'm sure.






Using a 3/4 rounded chisel so the stem has a rounded end entering the hull. Looks kind of nice. We are a little further along now than in this post, and it is starting to look pretty nice.

So, what we did is we epoxied them in place once we got the surfaces to match as best we could. We drilled pilot holes before we epoxied them so that we could screw them down tight with a round head screw dipped in wax, as to not break off in the tough oak. We put a layer of epoxy on and let the end grain of the strips soak it up, then added a layer of epoxy with the sawdust filler in it, screwed it into place and let it dry for over 24 hours. We then removed the screws, well, my dad did all this actually, and bored out the holes with 1/4" (?) drill. We cut bungs from a 1/4" maple dowel rod and tapped them in (pre-glued of course) with a hammer. We tried to match the grain direction for looks, it didn't work because the grain was masked by the saw blade marks, but it doesn't matter, it's getting covered over with brass. If we weren't using the brass we would have made bungs with oak and done it correctly. Since this step, the stems have been sanded down roughly and are looking really nice!





A nice pic of the roughly sanded hull. Looking good!!!!