To escape the rain, I moved the canoe into the painting studio, and proceeded with fiberglass and epoxy.  The sealer coat was a bit tacky, positioning the fiberglass cloth was tedious, and it was late Tuesday afternoon before I actually started wetting out.  No turning back, so we quickly set up lights, and I finished well after dark.

Next morning, I fitted up a vacuum to the random orbital sander, and scuffed down the high spots.  Noisy work, but very little dust.

I found a design for horses to support a canoe on one of the websites, and couldn’t quite decide whether to build yet another set of horses, when Alice hit upon the idea of simply inverting the canoe-building horse.  A couple of straps and clamps, and I was ready to start smoothing out the inside for fiberglassing.

This hull is really narrow at the stems, my planes wouldn’t reach the last several inches, and gouges and chisels were not particularly effective.  The right tool, as usual, was just lying around waiting for me to find it.  This morning, I got out the yari-kanna, or spear plane, and it is amazing.  It takes about five minutes to figure out how to use this tool, and half a lifetime to master.  Next time, we’ll shoot video.

Strip planking created a really unpredictable grain pattern.  Typically, alternate strips run in opposite directions, like planing plantation-grown mahogany.  On flat work with rowey grain, you can skew the plane body to make a narrow shearing cut and plane parallel, one direction then the other.  Inside the hull, I couldn’t do that with the little hollowing planes, because the length of the sole and the curve of the hull limits the cut.  The spear plane can approach any place from the most advantageous direction, provided you can read the grain.