Keel to hull joint
The kit provides two long mouldings to ease the gap between the keel and hull. We first dry-fitted them, pulling them into place with long screws to check the fit before removing them and gluing them back into place with epoxy.
The mouldings provide most of the required curve, but as they don’t taper to a feather edge there’s some work required to fair them into the hull and keel on either side.
We found this was best done in two stages. The first was to make a tapered fillet on either side, for which the square end of a filleting stick proved ideal. The angle was still too steep, however, so we used the back edge of a putty knife to form a curved transition on both sides using fairing filler.
The final shape to make was the lead into these mouldings at the forward edge of the keel. We did this using more epoxy and fairing filler, formed to shape as best we could when wet. We then finally shaped it using sandpaper in a roll to ensure the correct concave shape. The same technique was used to fair the fillets we had applied along the length of the keel.