As promised...

Slight amount of spring-back.  Nothing that can't be filled with a little goop.  Overall, I'm very happy with this attempt.  I may add one more strip for clearance.

Skully,

Before you glue those to the hull, I'd like to make a friendly suggestion that you call CLC and discuss this substitution with them. To me, it looks as if you're heading for trouble. If I'm wrong, you'll get to hear the experts say that I'm full of it. If I'm right, you could save yourself some damage to your boat.

I'm basing this on the photographs in the PMD construction gallery, especially this one:

In your other post, Pippy replied that the skid dimensions were 3/4"x1/2". That looks like a good match to the picture. In the picture, it's dimensional lumber, not plywood. Note that it's also placed on the narrower side (3/4") with 100% of the grain running fore/aft.

Comparing that to what you described, using plwood means that half the grain is in the lateral direction so you have less grain in the fore/aft direction than the skid in the picture. You also have the wider side against the hull, losing the dimensional stiffness provided by orienting the narrower side down. That will result in your skids having less stiffness than the ones in the CLC construction gallery. Will that be an issue? I don't know. Maybe the PMD doesn't need all that stiffness, maybe your skids (while not as stiff as they could be) are stiff enough. Either way, it might be worth a call to CLC to make sure.

Another concern is that while you mentioned glassing the skids in the original post, now you're saying you may just go with graphite/epoxy. If it was my boat, I'd put a couple of layers of at least 6 oz glass on the top of the skids before the graphite. The entire weight of the boat and all its contents will be ending up on those skids. That'll be a lot of pounds/square inch, especially since the curve will prevent the entire surface area of the skids from being used. Add in the fact that I believe you mentioned in a previous post that you're using okoume, that's awful soft wood to try standing up to abrasion across, say, a concrete ramp with a fully loaded boat. If you glass it, you'll have the wood providing compression resistance, the glass abrasion resistance and the graphite/epoxy making it slippery so that sharp points won't get an easy purchase.

Good luck,

Laszlo

   Weird... my post disappeared...

Anyway, I was just saying that after reading your post Laszlo, I panicked and had to go check my manual and skids...

According to the manual, the WIDE (3/4") side of the skid goes against the hull (phew!), and as such the skid rises 1/2" off of it.

Interestingly, although they seem like very good ideas, there's no mention of fibreglassing the skids in the manual and it even remarks that fillets are not necessary.

P

Glad to hear that. Sorry about the panic. That's why I was suggesting that Skully call CLC, there's only so much information you can get from a small picture. Thanks for posting what you found.

The reason that glassing the skids is not in the manual is probably because they are considered sacrificial. I was suggesting the glass because okoume is so much softer than even pine. It might be too sacrificial.

Laszlo

Thanks for the sanity check on this, guys.  Ironically, I read Laszlo's original response immediately upon coming into the house AFTER gluing the skids to the hull. 

One thought I had was that once the veneer gets scraped through, the next layer is the boil-proof glue they use to make the marine grade plywood, which is pretty tough.  I've done some informal destructive stress testing on the marine grade plywood and it's much tougher than regular 1/4" plywood.  The five layer lamination is super strong, stiff and heavy as a baseball bat.  The fact that it fits the rocker perfectly, I belive, relieves stress in the final boat.  My EP was under a lot of strain with the forced oak skids.

I will be soaking the skids with CPES, which will penetrate the top veneer and into both sides.  I will also be doing a large fillet on both sides to add stability and to smooth out the "bump".  This will be in addition to a large radius round over around the entire skid.  This will create a shape that will be very easy to add a couple of strips of glass over.

I even had another thought.  I could theoretically route out all the wood once the fillets are in place.  This would then create a negative which I could then fill with more thickened epoxy.  This would make the skids entirely out of epoxy with no actual wood product.  I doubt that I'll do anything that extreme, but I thought it was an interesting concept.

I'll post more pics here in a bit.