Hello all,

Forgive me if this is an amatureish question but last night one of the Scarf joints on my "Walrus in embryo" split. It was on one of the stringers that has quite a twist and unfortunatly it was located near the end of the boat where the twisting was fairly tight. I have been fortunate to place the other scarfs around the middle of the boat so they are not under such an extreme condition.

The joint seperated along the glue joint and did not rip out any wood, I was using epoxy. I plan to re-glue the joint using epoxy and sister it with a wood strip and screws. Unfortunatly now I have no faith in my joints. I wonder since it split along the glue joint, maybe I just got a bad batch of epoxy. It has been very hot in my work area so maybe the batch went bad from the heat. The other thing I wonder is if perhaps I clamped the joint to tightly and squeezed all the glue out. Im just using the store bought, 2 part syringe type epoxy with a 30 min work time. The directions said not to use above 107 degrees and Ive probably exceeded that from time to time despite putting a fan on the joints and things like that(Arizona is hot as hell this time of year).

I dont want to go back and sister all of the scarfs on the boat as this is sort of unatractive. I was thinking of buying some short screws and screwing all of them for extra protection but there is not much meat to screw to in a scarf joint.

Im not sure what to do at this point, I want to be confident in this boat, but seeing that broken joint is pretty depressing. I cant imagine trying to fix a joint in the end of the boat after it was skinned either, so perhaps Im lucky that it broke now.

Any advice anybody?

Kirk