Gluing the ama bottoms (1)

Six hours of work today. We dry screwed the 10 mm planks on the bottom stringers, making sure they fitted snugly at the butts.

Here's Cinzia scribing the outline of the bottom panels

We then removed the scribed planks to cut them to shape

We cut a few mm outside the lines. We started with the small circular saw but the blade went dull quite soon. So we gave a try to this jigsaw which I've had around for some time but never used. Well, I don't know what that is, but it proved a badass jigsaw, probably 5 times faster than the circular saw. Cuts through plywood like butter!

Here's the whole bottom ready for the glue

We used about 700 g of resin thickened with the usual microfibers for a quite thick putty. Here's Cinzia starting to spread the glue on the bottom stringers

We wanted to be sure to fill voids (fairing was far from perfect) so we used liberal amounts of putty. Another good thing is that the bottom panels, at 10 mm thick, are quite rigid and hence "self fairing".We than prebored the planks and screwed them in sequence, using, as usual, 3.5x40 mm screws lubricated with some WD40. Quite some putty squeezed out of the glue line, which we cleaned both inside and outside. We decided to install the internal, 2 cm thick butt blocks specified for the bottom later, i. e. when we'll turn the floats rightside up. Here's the final view with the usual milestone beer.

Total work time to date: 138 hours.