Hey Steve,

11 stations now huh ? Well that's progress i guess. I remember now that Rob called the extra stations "half stations" and it was a little job to line them all up. 3/16" strips .... sounds like you made your own strips too, I am glad i made my strips "thin", 1/4" strips seem like real "planks" to me now. I know it is only a small part off the total weight, but with the epoxy adding so much weight it makes me happy that I could use my skill as a carpenter to trim as much weight as I could. I am just rolling on the "fill" coats of resin on the hull now, putting the 3rd coat on tonight and then maybe a 4th coat tomorrow (each coat seems to add a little less than 1 pound of resin to the boat) and then a light sand and then 2 more coats. Then comes that wonderful moment I have been looking forward to .... taking it off the strongback and flipping it over !!! I have saved my "best" wood for the deck. It has the best colors and grain. I did the bead and cove detail in my hull strips and for some of my deck strips, but have planed most of the strips square for the "flat" part of the deck. I remember how many clamps it took to keep the B & C strips together without staples, I can only imagine how many I will use to keep the square strips aligned between the stations. It must take even more with only 11 stations. I finally have experience in all the steps coming up in stripping and glassing the deck anyway :-) So I am really looking forward to this part of the job. I see you have made your bulkhead panels too, so we are very close to the same stage. I will keep you posted on any interesting things that may come up when I start on the deck, maybe I will have something to say in a week or 2. I have some pics, but don't own a scanner, it seems all my friends do so maybe. It is remarkable (not really since we both built from basically the same plans) how much my boat looks like your's anyway. Even to the mostly reddish hull (where are you, on the west coast like me, where redwood is one of the woods most redily available) and the accent line at the sheer.

Looks like you are just going to do what I just finished, let me know if I can share anything to help with the glassing. I let it intimidate me a little bit before I started, but it was not hard and a little experience (like on the bulkheads) helped a lot. I was happy with putting on a seal coat first. When you lay on the glass and before you put on the fill coats don't "scuff" the glass with sandpaper or anything. Also put some effort in to getting the cut edge of the cut glass pieces you overlay on to the first piece of glass. If you leave them ragged it is harder to fill and smooth out the hull.

Best of luck,

Arthur