Good luck with your build! I started my first last year about this time. A couple of things that I noticed with regards to bead and cove, I chose not to use this method. There are areas near both end of the boat that don't lend themselves weld to the bead and cove method. I chose to buy the most expensive block plane (Lie-Nielsen) and planed everything. Believe it or not, I haven't had to sharpen the blade once and it worked beautifully.

Rob Macks, from what I understand, prefers planing the edges over the bead and cove. At this point with my deck and hull in the living room, his suggestions paid off. I was careful to make sure all the edges lined up no worse than 1/32". This worked great and made final fairing really quick.

On the complete hot glue method I found that you really need to pay attention to the subtle bending required at both stems. Forcing the issue pops the hot melt. I resorted to using small brads backed by little pieces of wood when I ran into dificult spots. I think I ended up with around 10 holes that turned nice and black when I did the fiberglassing.

What I learned out of this whole process is a couple of brads or little mistakes don't matter at all. Everyone that looks at the "close" to final job is astonished. The funny thing is it isn't as hard as I originally thought it would be.

I've attached a link to my blog, not updated to the latest.

http://sommerkayak.blogspot.com/