Let's build a Rudder!

Ok, nothing too much has been going on in the boat building realm due to the fact that it's been too oppressively hot to do anything in the garage. Also, I'm not sure that working with epoxy when it's over 100 degrees outside is the smartest thing!

Well finally I decided to get back on the project and work on something that is small and easily manageable in small doses so I decided to start working on the rudder. First things first - I went to home deport and bought a new 60tooth fugro saw blade for my table saw.

I photocopied the template for the rudder, cut it out, and glued it onto one end of the board I had previously glued up. I started the process by cutting kerfs at 1/8" intervals on both sides of the board using the glued template as a guide.

Once it was cut I started by cutting down the ridges using a #5 plane until it got close to the bottom of the ridge

. I then switched over to the belt sander to get it really close to final, and finished it up using a long board sander. Initially I was a little tentative with the belt sander and tried to use the long board sander to do the bulk of the sanding. This ended up being a lot of work. Once I switched to the belt sander it went a lot quicker!

As you can see it turned out pretty nice! Next step is to apply the fiberglass.