Rub Rails Day 3

In what's a familiar effort by now, I spent a bit of the afternoon working on the rub rails.  Again.  Every time I revisit these, I find something else wrong with them.  And every time I find something wrong, I commit about an hour to fixing it.  Today was no different.

Today's session started by wiping down the entire boat with denatured alcohol.  The idea here was to kill any germs that might've grown in the grain and to also give a good wipe down from the last couple days of sanding.  Some parts really popped here like the rub rail laminations, giving a quick glimpse to what should be the finished product some weeks from now.

Most of the extra squeeze out from the original glue up remained, though. I'd only sloughed off the big stuff over the last couple midnights in the garage.  Fully awake and armed with a new, positive attitude today, I sanded away the remaining drips.  Looks pretty good! -- but also exposed serious voids between the laminations.

 

Careful readers will note I want not just a functional boat, but a comfortable, seaworthy boat fitted for overnight transits on the Great Lakes and the Caribbean.  And not just comfortable and seaworthy, but pretty, too.  The issue here is firmly cosmetic but as important to me as sail ratios and displacement.  I can't be bobbing around on something I didn't at least try to look good.  These voids are troubling, partly because the port side has not nearly as many issues, as this photo shows.

By the time I put these down,, I'd done the rub rails 3 times (I did the port side twice because it was uneven the first time), so I was over the learning curve.  I'd also discovered by then a way to pull the rub rails tight by screwing them from inside the boat.  Alas, starboard got short shrift.

This is a dilemma that has a couple solutions, none ideal.  Short of ripping them all off and slapping on some strips of pine (which I considered, believe it or not) I'm going to abandon my recent decision to pour clear epoxy in here and go with white filler.  I'd love to be able to do brown but there's already too much white and I think it'll look really bad with streaks of white then brown then white.  I'll nleed to be really careful here with the squeeze out as a mistake here could be awful.  The cure can't be worse than the disease!

The small fillet between the rub rail will also be white.  With white topsides I don't think it'll be too bad, but it will have a definite "bathroom grout" vibe which is not something naval architects ever want to remembered for.

All of this sped through my mind during the 90 minutes taking care of business here.  When I got to the stern, I then decided to trim rub rail flush with the transom.

 

I started with a small hand saw to cut away the bulkier parts, then sanded the rest down with 60 grit on the random orbital, shaping as time went on.  This wood is hard!  What I thought would be maybe ten minutes of work turned into 30 minutes of finesse.  I finally got the rake to where it needs to be but not without a lot of effort.  You can see the trapezoidal form the rail takes in a cross section.  I was done about 15 minutes later, thus completing a small task towards the finished product.