: Another one.

Looks like way too much glue--you'll have fun scraping it all off. But the strips bending in is from clamping pressure. Too much. Although sometimes it is from a tight fit with bead and cove strips.

Hot gluing your strips to the forms may prevent them from springing into a natural curve. clanping strips to adjacent strips can twist them into a straight line along their seam. When the clamp pressure is released and they try to lay onto the forms, there is a long piece of wood trying to fit into a shorter distance, and the excess wood has to go somewhere. If you are using a lot of hot glue to hold the strips to the forms that could add to your problem.

You shouldn't need to clamp your strips to each other between the forms. If they are not fitting well just by bending them, then you need to adjust the fit with a plane. Trim off the excess wood so the new strip touches the old one evenly along their entire shared seam. Make the strips the right shape, don't use clamping to force them into an improper curve.

To fix the uindented areas you need to release the pressure on your seams. You can try cutting them open with a hot utility knife, or even with a cold knife. You can also try softening the glue line with a heat gun and see if the wood will spring free. If so, when it cools again it will be reglued. Or, you can keep it warm and totally remove a piece. Use slow gentle passes with a sharp utility knife to cut through the strip at a form, heat the area where it doesn't fit until it comes free (this takes a while) and pull it out gradually, keeping your heat on the area you are trying to loosen and remove in the next few seconds. Once the old strip is out, you may need to scrape off the old glue to get a new strip ito fit in. Get a new one and just butt it against your cut to replace the indented one. Use staples or brads into the forms to hold the new strip in place while its glue sets. An occasional staple hole looks like a natural feature in the wood and will not detract from the looks.

Try to break some of the hot glue free of the forms around the areas which are affected. While it is nice to try to build a boat without using staples, using staples is certainly much easier. If you break off the hot glue as you build your current strips can float over the form with slight changes in temperature and humidity, and it will not be a struggle to get the boat off of the forms when the last strips are installed. Now that you have a few strips installed it doesn't take much adhesion to keep those on the building forms. Take advantage of the open area you have to loosen a few of them.

Why not try holding your strips to the forms with something other than hot glue? You could staple a scrap of wood NEXT to your strip, and use that to clamp the strip to the form, but still allow it to move a little as it curves into shape.

Right now I'd get out a paint scraper and try to reduce the volume of excess glue drips. That may hellp you see the lines a bit better. Some of the bulges and dips in the strips will come out when you fair and sand the hull, too. It it noce to be a perfectionist at all stages of the building process--but sometimes you have to allow for a good deal of slack. You want to turn strips with square edges into a rounded curved hull and deck. Geometrically it won't work. But if we start with a piece which is slightly bigger than we need, we can scrape, sand, file, chisel, or carve the wood to get the desired shape. Don't try to get the seams fair as you install the strips. Let the center line of each strip lay on the building forms, and the edges will probably ride a bit higher. let it be that way for now. Once the glue is hard you sand off the excess height to attain the curved shape. Don't rush the process, and don't let excess glue get in your way.

When you apply the fiberglass your epoxy resin is going to seap into the seams between your strips anywhere you have a gap between puddles of glue. The epxoy is a lot stronger than the glue you are using--and you are probably using a very strong glue as it is. Using LESS of your glue when gluing up strips will still keep the strips together, but it will allow more room for epoxy to get in to eventually do a Stronger bond. Another case of "Less is More".

Try to use just enough glue so that when the strip is installed the squeezeout looks like a row of beads 1/4 the size of a grain of rice. These beads should sit on the seam where you can easily knock them off with a dull scraper when they dry. If you have any drips or flow from your glue then it is a sign your seam is too loose (poor fitting) or has too much glue and capillary action between the pieces is not sucking the glue in.

When you go to sand--and believe me there is plenty of sanding in your future--excess glue creates a nightmare. Most of the time it melts and smears, clogging expensive sandpaper in seconds, and wasting time and money. a coarse grit sandpaper will work to get the bulk of the mess off, but it mush be used delicately, or it will cut deeply into the soft cedar--and delicate work is not the nature of coarse grit sandpaper. So you'll still go slow.

RIght now you are at a point to put on the rest of the strips with less glue, and in your spare time, work away ast small sections to get off the current drips. By the time the boat is stripped it should be looking good.

Hope this helps

PGJ