Re: now you did it

Posted by CLC on Feb 5, 2005

>>>>>>>>>Yare/Severn where retention of the wires was a part of the construction, thereafter 3" tape and 6oz glass became the standard with excessive fillets developing over the squished in wires.

:>>>>>>>>>>>>>

This just isn't right. We advise larger-than-might-be-necessary fillets now, as we did 10 or 12 years ago, for one reason only: so that there are large safety margins for first-time builders. Some sort of lazy drift from large fillets of early days to large fillets now is in Lee's imagination.

Someone who has built several boats can start to focus on perfect fillets, but very few of our customers have that kind of experience. Getting fillets exactly the right size is really quite hard and takes a lot of practice. Applied by a builder who in all likelihood is using epoxy for the first time, the fillet on a Chesapeake kayak needs to smoothly cove out the angle between side and bottom so that the fiberglass tape and/or fabric bonds the hull panels together beyond the slightest doubt.

Luckily, the only chine-seam failure I'm aware of in a CLC boat was one of ours, in my presence. The finished and varnished 16LT's fillets were very small and there was (almost) no interior 'glass tape. I stepped into the cockpit while the boat was sitting on the ground and about 24" of chine simply unzipped.

Such a thing happening out in the field is unthinkable. Thus we will continue to proscribe large, very strong fillets with big safety margins.

There are exceptions. I certainly don�t mind builders �tabbing� the hulls and removing the wires, if they don�t mind the extra step and keep in mind the essential goal of making sure the sides remain glued to the bottoms. Tabbing won�t do any harm and it almost always comes out neater. The Arctic Hawk kit adopts an extremely methodical approach that definitely results in neater, smaller fillets, but at considerable cost in time and money.

In Response to: now you did it by LeeG on Feb 5, 2005

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