I worked on some more fins, of a sort, about a week ago, I think. The fins in question this time are the daggerboard and the rudder. These items are important tools for getting a sailboat to go in a direction you might want it to go, assuming you want it to go somewhere besides straight downwind.
I had to shape these two items, which came to me as flat pieces of plywood but which must have some nice curvy surfaces on them in order to work well. The leading edges -- the ones toward the bow -- are supposed to have a 'bullet' profile, while the trailing edges have a 2-inch taper that goes almost to a sharp edge. Almost. Sharp-ish.
I used a number of tools to do the shaping -- mostly, the random orbital sander, with 80-grit sandpaper. I started out with 120 grit, as I was nervous about shaping the poor fins into oblivion, but soon realized that it would be Boxing Day before I finished. For the long taper I even used a block plane, which I have recently acquired but apparently still don't know how to use. I need to find Block Planes for Dummies at the library. At any rate, a combination of cheap files, sander, and router got it all in pretty good shape. Router? Yes, I started each edge by doing a 1/4 inch roundover, just to get things going. It helped, maybe.
There was also some more conventional rounding over to do in the rudder head. That's the part on the left below, and, we hope, it doesn't poke down into the water very often. The rudder prefers to keep its head above water, as it were. And also more rounding over on the daggerboard handle. So, yeah, I had done all that and sanded every thing down and it all looked good, so it needed some epoxy to seal it.
I used otherwise perpetually annoying wire coat hangers -- I could write a book about coat hangers -- to suspend these items mid-air, enabling me to lay epoxy on all of their surfaces in one go. Surely there will be some drips to smooth out. I can handle it.
