For the past week (yes, WEEK!) I have been working on the outwales and spacered inwales. The inwales and outwales are such an obvious part of the boat that you really want them to look as good as you can possibly make them. And doing that takes a lot of time and patience.  The spacered inwale kit is an addition to the basic wherry kit. The kit includes the OUTwales, but does not come with INwales. We like the look of the spacered inwales and find that they have some function too for securing things to the hull. They look nautical.    The spacered inwale kit comes with inwale rails, sticks you cut to make the spacers, a replacement breasthook for the bow, and replacement quarter knees for the transom.  They leave it up to you for how long to cut the spacers and how far apart to space them. The manual that comes with the kit is extensive.  I like the look of rounded spaces. No, it's not the normal look of spacers which are supposed to simulate the ribs on a wooden...

For the past few days I have been tinkering on the outwales, spacered inwales, and the seats/thwarts.  At the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival this year, I saw another Annapolis Wherry that had a lovely bow treatment along the outwales at the bow. Instead of ending the outwales near the bow, this builder brought the inwales all the way around the bow. I'm trying to do the same thing, although I think that other builder is a better woodworker than I am, based on how it looks so far!  I used screws to temporarily hold the assembly in place while the epoxy cures. They have now been removed.  The assembly is made up of cutoffs from the inwales and outwales. I screwed up on one side but luckily had enough cutoffs to make another one. The center accent strip is Alaskan yellow cedar. It will look a lot better once it has been shaped. I'll do that after all the inwales and outwales have been installed.  I've also now epoxied on the first two outwales, one on port and one o...

 Epoxying the inside of the CLC Expedition Wherry will take a much longer time than the outside did.  The inside is done in sections instead of the entire hull at one go. It's easier to do it in smaller sections like that, but is more tedious and time consuming.  CLC also wants you to run beads of thickened epoxy along all the hull seams and bulkhead seams. I am not sure why they want you to run seams along the hull panels, especially in the middle of the boat where the panels and much closer to flat to each other. That type of seam will have virtually no appreciable strength. I'm only running beads along both sides of the bulkheads, and along the panels at the bow and stern but only along the keel. Otherwise I'll leave it to the very strong holding power of the fiberglass cloth on both the inside and outside.    For fiberglassing the inside, CLC suggests that you cut a specific sized rectangle for each of the inside bays. There are different measurements...

It's been a couple weeks since my last post. Haven't had too much time to work on the Pinguino. But this weekend I made up some ground. So far I've added a third coat of epoxy to the entire outside of the boat, and have sanded parts of the deck where the hatches and cockpit cowling will go. The hull I will let cure until the boat is done and I'm about to varnish. Yesterday I cut the hatches. Today I installed the spacer pieces for the hatches and the lower spacer pieces for the cowling. I then ran a bead of thickened epoxy around the outside of the cowling. It adds a nice touch and feels good on your fingers when you attach your spray skirt. Here's how it looks now... Yes, I have a lot of clamps. No, you can never have enough. :-P Over the years of making RC sailboats and other hobbies, I've amassed several boxes of clamps. Most are spring loaded which I prefer to screw-down C-clamps. I use C-clamps when I really need to get some pressure down, ...