Fitting the thwarts
The filleting on the inside took much, much longer than expected,” said a slightly weary-looking Jeremy Butler as he described the latest progress on building his 14ft Western Skiff. Regular readers will remember we left him last month, having turned the hull over, still elated with how fast the boat was taking shape. “
It was a different story this month as he tackled the time-consuming tasks of filleting the inside of the hull and then cleaning it up for a full coat of epoxy.
“When I’ve filleted boats in the past, there weren’t any frames in the way, so I could mask off and fillet the whole plank length, then all you’ve got is a tricky bit at the start and a tricky bit at the end. Here, you’ve got lots of sections between the frames, with four times as many starts and ends. And, after you’ve done all that, you still have to fillet around the frames too.”
Despite the extra work (his time log shows he spent 9½ hours filleting the inside of the boat alone), he stuck with his self-imposed discipline of taping the edges of the seams first to achieve a neat finish. Partly this was because he plans to varnish the inside of his boat,
