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Tolman Alaska Skiff
Update 2
(Update 1 - Original Post)

click to enlarge Welcome back boys and girls. If you remember, last month, we left our intrepid Tolman builder as he was just finishing putting the hull together. About as quick as that was done, our hero began taping the outside chines.
click to enlarge Here you can see the unique lines of the Jumbo hull starting to take shape.
click to enlarge Once the taping is finished, Jim coats the entire outside of the boat with glass cloth set in epoxy. First the sides....
click to enlarge ...then the bottom. If you look closely, you will see that Jim is using a yellow plastic squeege to spread the resin which is first poured on the fiberglass cloth.
click to enlarge After the glass is all applied, the weave is filled and the whole thing is sanded ahead of fairing. Jim got a Ridgid 6" random oribital sander on my advice. So far it seems to be a good tool.
click to enlarge Out come the phenolic microballoons and the fairing begins. Jim got a really good surface and did not need to do much of this.
click to enlarge Following Renn's advise and the lead of several other Tolman builders, Jim mixes powdered graphite with epoxy resin to coat the bottom with a hard, slippery mix.
click to enlarge Now it's time to apply the UHMW rubbing strips to the bottom of the boat. But first they have to be cut from the raw stock and rounded on the corners. Here Jim uses his router table with a radius bit to round the strips.
click to enlarge Then the strips are drilled and counter drilled. Jim used a 3/8" spade bit to counter bore so that the washers under the pan head SS screws he used would have a flat landing.
click to enlarge Jim's wife, Mary, helped the day he screwed the strips to the bottom of the boat.
click to enlarge The next step was to get the splash rail ready.
click to enlarge Fron this closeup you can see that two layers are used to get the curve of the bow. Jim glued the two strips in place to be smoothed and painted off the boat, then reapplied.
click to enlarge In this picture, Jim has applied thickened epoxy to only the two faces to be glued and is screwing it temporarily to the side of the boat following a line drawn earlier.
click to enlarge Now Jim begins masking the hull sides prior to painting. Note that he has masked the area where the splash rail will go too.
click to enlarge This is what the hull looked like after the first coat of the white one-part polyurethane paint.
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While the paint dries, Jim works on those splash rails.
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Once smoothed nicely, they are then fitted to the hull and trimmed.

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Here, Jim uses his Harbor Freight LPHV spray gun to add the green boot stripe.
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Once the painting was finished, a rollover frame was begun. There is a 3 foot drop-off beyond the door of the shop. This is handy for taking a boat out to a trailer, but not for turning the boat over.
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So we placed the cradles on top of the boat, wrapped planks around the hull and built a new strongback atop the whole mess.

Next: Turnover

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