Did you ever wonder how Daniel Larusso felt in The Karate Kid? Read me before "Progress is mine!"

Last night was a ton of sanding and the assembly of the hull panels.

I know how Daniel-san must have felt  at the hands of Mr. Myagi ("wax on, wax off") after several hours getting the hull panels smoothed out and ready for joining.  If I could have an early Christmas wish, it would be for an extra 100 square feet of work-space, for reasons that will be clear in a sec.

My work is all taking place on a temporary workbench approximately 3' by 16' (if I'd been able to do so, I'd have set up a pair of benches about 4 by 16 with an aisle down the middle and worked with material on both sides.  Sob!).  When I got through sanding and it was time to join the two panel halves there was nowhere enough room to do all of the panels, so i concentrated on what i would be using first - the 22 pieces that make up the hull.  Even with that and trying to interleave the ends to get stuff kinda overlapping, there wasn't a lot of room so i wound up stacking panels two or four layers deep, interleaved with plastic sheeting and weighted down with barbell plates and kettle-bells. It's curing now, so tonight's first task is to see whether my crash course in wetting out fiberglass was well learned.  If not, I think this will be a re-work day.  Hoping not.

Here are just the hull panels to give you an idea of how crowded things are at the moment.  The deck panels are hiding on another bench.  You can just see them in the background on the right.  All the smaller bits are safely tucked away elsewhere.

Tomorrow, I hope to to move on to epoxying the bulkheads and to start stitching the hull and seat.  I'm breaking from the manual's recommended approach, and I'll be doing a saturation coat on the inside of the hull, just not sure yet whether that'll be on the panels or the half-completed hull.  Time will tell.

Speaking of time, the manual puts the time needed to get to where I'm at in the process at 3 hours, compared to the 11 or so that i've put in so far.  That's to pull everything out of the box, match the panels to the inventory sheet provided by WD, edge and surface sand every panel and component except the deck panels, and join just the hull panels.  I know that the size of my work-space counts toward the big difference in my results (my utter lack of experience with epoxy does too), and i think/hope that that will start to matter less as i start turning the panels into something resembling a boat.  Like maybe by the end of the weekend :)

I know that there are people who do these kits in their living rooms and I wonder how such people can stay married/attached.  The amount of sanding you need to do even to do a light sanding raises an enormous amount of dust, and it's very fine.  I can't imagine living in the same space, no matter how well i had the area curtained off, unless you had an industrial dust-management system.  Not to mention the smell of epoxy - not conducive to a happy household.