The stern block was too small both fore and aft and vertically so more wood was glued on with epoxy. When the glue set I rough shaped it using a long batten across the frames to check progress. There was about half a wheelie bin of shavings to clean up!
The inner part of the keel has a 100x50 mm cross section and is about 4.5 m long. Half of it is straight and half is curved as it comes up to the stern. Clearly this size timber would not bend so it had to be either cut from solid timber (pieces scarph joined together) or laminated from thinner strips. I chose to laminate it and tried a 100x12.5 piece of hoop pine over the curve; it broke! Ended up with 5 strips of 100x10 each of them with a scarph joint somewhere to get the length needed. Then the biggest gluing job I have ever done, five pieces of timber, 4 glue lines to be primed on both surfaces and then one surface coated with thickened epoxy before being stacked along the top of the moulds. Usual problem with clamps - you never have enough of them!
While that lot of epoxy has a couple of days to harden I made a start on the inside stem. Again there is a curve to negotiate and this time it is sharper. I didn't fancy laminating this (at least 10 strips to get to the 50 mm thickness plus possible soaking or even steaming to get them round the bend) so decided to build it out of 25 mm thick blocks. Once again it needs to be 100 mm wide so four layers of blocks with all the joints staggered. Here is the first layer of 4 blocks being glued up over the plan from the lofting - how can it not fit? You can only just see it, there is kitchen film under the glue joints so it doesn't get stuck to the plan.
Over the next few days I will be cleaning up the sides of the inner keel and building up the rest of the inner stem. Here is a photo of the inner stem with the last layer glued in place.
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