: Hopefully if I can get up in the morning I will have finished sanding
: (outside only) my first hull.

: Can you advise whether I should take the hull off the strongback and sand the
: inside or flip the strongback and begin on the deck ?

: Am i right to save the glassing & epoxying till the end ?

: TIA

I would suggest keeping both hull and deck on the forms for now. Flip it over and plane and sand the deck. This should also ensure that you have a good fit and finish at the shear line.

What works well for me is to then remove the deck and I then run electrical tape along the mating edges of the shear lines. any epoxy will then pop off and you don't have to mess with cleaning up the shear. I trim the tape only on the outer edges using a razor blade.

What I have done after that is to seal coat the deck and then remove it while I glass the outside of the hull. If you have room in your shop, you can make a temporary form to hold the deck and you can glass that right after doing the hull. I have found that seal coating helps me to get a more uniform look to the finish, specially if I need to fill a few areas with epoxy/sawdust putty before glassing.

One suggestion at this point is to put deck and hull back together while epoxy is still "green" and bungee them together. The idea here is that the shape will be pretty much set after glassing and If you have things aligned at this stage, it really helps in the final mating of the two halves.

This really helped me on my last project. It was very easy to align the hull and deck for glassing at the shear line. My first project took a HUGE amount of force to bring the two into alingment. I even sprained my wrist in the process. So I figured there must be a better way to ensure alignment...and there was.

Tom