Bow Repairs

Goodness, after last month's outing in Richmond, I have been busy - a bit reclusive, but busy.

One major effort has been the repair and fairing of the bow. This is what the bow looked like early last month:



Almost a "hook nose" or maybe a modified "bulbous nose," but either way in need of repair.



Damaged riding home from the outing... obviously, I need to figure out the trailer set up and configuration.

Another perspective of the hollow originally (but not intentionally) built into the bow:



That's a short metal ruler taped to the hull to show the depth of the hollow.

A bit of work was going to be needed to fair the bow. Fortunately, I avoided creating a similar hollow on the port side. However, the port side had its own flaws to be revealed and repaired. Here is the port side after the first bit of sanding:



Let me back up just a bit... How did such a catastrophe ever result from the simple slab-sided Goat Island Skiff design? I can assure you it wasn't easy!

When I assembled the hull, I did not get the two side panels as close together as they should have been right at the stem. Now, that was my take on the plans and how I assembled the hull. Having gone through this entire repair process, I'm not so sure...

But, I was convinced that the gap between the side panels needed to be closed. The gap seemed huge, flat (once partially filled with thickened epoxy) and altogether wrong.



(And, yes, the outwales to not match up - but a later solution will take care of that.)

My solution to filling the gap and getting a start on fairing the bow was to glue a dowel into the gap, cover the dowel with FG tape, and fair it all into the hull. In theory that should have worked and probably would have, had I used a smaller dowel and taken a bit more time to install it. As it was, I was pushing against a self-imposed deadline and I used too large (3/8") a dowel. I troweled fairing compound on the bow trying to get a fair shape. Failing that, I covered the stem with FG tape, thinking the tape would span the hollow and provide a nice sleek shape. Didn't work.

Next, the deconstruction...