: Ian, you're welcome.

: Although it would be preferable to layer all of your strips with
: the grain running in the same direction, and it would make it
: easier to plane them. It is not easy to accomplish this
: feat...trying to keep all of your strips oriented in the same
: direction, while heat/steam bending them, clamping and gluing
: them up where you want them, is quite a handful of things to
: keep track of at once!

: I have about 3 and 1/2 strips per side on my kayak and I starting
: to get the hang of it. It is more challenging than I thought it
: would be. Please don't ask me if the grain is running the same
: direction in all of these strips, it won't happen.

: Greg

Just to clarify - I meant the strips laminated on the stem, not the strips you are currently laying on the forms. I never worried about getting the grain aligned with those, cutting them 1/4 cut meant the grain was pretty uniform overall fortunately. (And the sander didn't care.)

Something else I thought of: although I rounded off the stem quite a lot, it was still a little too abrupt for the glass cloth to conform to the fairly tight bend. So when I laid the glass over the stem, it wanted to lift on either side. We were able to beat it into submission by wrapping cling film (Glad wrap) around the bow, which did a great job of pressing the cloth tight up against the stem.

Cheers, Ian