Really wish I could go back and edit the posting title with the missing "s"

I asked myself the same question when attaching rudder hardware to the hull of my Waterlust canoe last year. The recommended Drill-Fill-Drill technique protects vulnerable wood from water intrusion while at the same time reinforcing the structure of wood fibers adjacent to fasteners that penetrate so there's some logic to thinking that epoxy alone may offer greater holding power than just the wood itself.

But when there's precious little wood where you want - or need - to install fasteners, what then? At the curved stern on the Waterlust there's no end-pour to provide bedding, just a deep fillet reinforcing the rather steep angle joint between hull panels.

Turning to available research done by the brothers Gougeon – who played a big role in bringing epoxy technology to the boat building scene back some fifty+ years ago – I took articles like this one to heart. So I cast an aluminum powder-reinforced block of epoxy into the stern where I intended to place the lower rudder hardware then drilled & tapped it for the machine screws holding the hardware in place. Total length of the threaded bores is roughly 7/8" where two of those 1/4x20 screws come together on the inside, leaving no room for fitting a nut.

There's more out there supporting this procedure, notably by Mike Waters who's designed and built many popular trimaran watercraft, once of which is his W-17 CLC makes kits for. You can read more on Mike's website.

(And I too wish there were at minimum an <edit> button here....)

Apologies about double-posting that last bit, and missing the link to the article I wanted to highlight on Mike's website.

https://smalltridesign.com/Trimaran-Articles/Construction-tips/mounting-hardware.html  

Thanks for all of the articles!  I have been looking them over for a few weeks.  Time to commit.