inner stem and fibreglassing

[andscott]

hi, can anyone please give me some advice on what to do inside the hull with the inner stem. ive fibreglasses the outside and sanded down then removed hull from molds and am in process of scraping inside of hull, the inner stem comes to an abrupt end in the bottom of hull. q1 is it left like that and q2how the hell do you fibreglass over it or do you just glass up to the edge of the stem?cheers andy uk.

[Rabbit]

some people glass up to them. i didn't like that idea, so i taped the inner stems down to about 1/4 inch and then filleted along the sides and around the end with thickened epoxy. the fillets were shaped round and i also filleted along the stem all the way up so that it had curves between the stem and the hull and glassed it all in.

[Cruiser]

I am at roughly the same stage and using Canoecraft as a main guide and this forum.
Q1: I believe the inner stem gets rounded over so it isn't abrupt.
Q2: I plan on laying the glass over the stem and leaving the 2" around the stem dry until the area surrounding the stem is wetted. Then I will cut the fiberglass along the stem, wet it and use the sqeejee to tuck the glass to the stem. It gets trimmed and smoothed prior to second epoxy coat.

This pretty much straight out of the book and how I plan to handle.

Brian

[andscott]

thanks for your helpful replies its much appreciated, good luck with your own builds,regards andy scott