board 1: First Deck Layer II

Here are some pictures taken the next day, after the deck lamination dried.

There is a small dent in one place, which I'll fill in before the next layer.


The fish tail was tricky, and I had to improvise a bit. I ended up cutting the cloth, leaving a small part of the foam uncovered for now. If you click on the closeup picture of the tail, you can get a good closeup view of what the bamboo cloth looks like after lamination. You can see that it looks all fuzzy, and it may almost seem like there are patches with too little resin to fully saturate the cloth. But those are just a lot of little bamboo fibers sticking up above the lamination. It's supposed to be like that, and you just have to sand the last layer before hotcoating.

The brown Elmer's glue discoloration near the nose (from gluing two foam pieces together when building the blank) turned into a rust-colored halo once I glassed over it. The Gorilla glue that I used to glue in the stringer isn't visible at all, so if I ever make my own blank again, it's Gorilla glue all the way.