I woke up this morning with a sneaking suspicion I had done something wrong last night. Wasn't sure what, but I was sure it had to do with the angles on the transom. Got to the shop tonight and pulled the screws from the last scarfs and scraped the joints then pulled the screws from the transom and stood it up.
See anything wrong with that angle? Yep, it's fifteen degrees to the left instead of fifteen degrees to the right. Dang it. I know how it happened, I was working from the wrong side of the transom and got the angles wrong in my head. Oh well, as Steveoh says, epoxy solves all problems.
Decided to cut and glue up the lower doubler and then fix the upper doubler as I knew that would be messy. Drew my line on the transom to set the distance between the upper and lower doubler, clamped the the 1/2" ply down, traced the transom, unclamped and cut all the angles. Made up a couple large batches of epoxy, slathered the transom and the doubler and put in a bunch of screws. Plenty of squeeze out and that always makes me happy. :-) Probably would drive Renn crazy with the waste, but I'm willing to waste some rather than not get enough epoxy on and starve the joints (dry spots on the wood where the resin fully soaks in leaving none to attach to the other piece) .
Made up a third large batch of resin and liberally coated my now beautifully useless gap in the upper doubler, coated the pieces I had cut out (glad I saved them!), and then used the rest of the resin to make up a large batch of peanut butter. Spread that liberally in the gaps; up the sides and in the valley, and then put the pieces in. Pushed and prodded and moved those pieces all around to make sure I got lots of peanut butter in the gaps and then screwed those down. Then I used my fingers to spread the squeeze out back into the little gaps remaining.
No longer pretty, but it'll look fine and work fine when I clean it up tomorrow. Besides, once I paint it...
Here's what the transom looks like so far.
With the cooler working environment it's taking 72 hours for the epoxy to fully set up so I won't be able to really go back to this until Monday, but I've a plan already to get that gap back. I need to buy a power hand planer for the stringers (the horizontal long members on the bottom of the hull that provide the longitudinal strength) anyways, so I'll do that this weekend. I'll use the planer and sander to get things level. Then I'll use my Skilsaw to cut the angles. And then I'll use my router to carve out the gap between the cuts. Not elegant, but it'll work.
Oh, some good news today. The resin order from Aero-Marine got here today. All three boxes and 100+ pounds of it! I've stored most of it in the garage to keep it warm and brought the small box home to open and look at. They shipped it in one gallon containers so it'll be easier to handle than the five gallon cubes I'm using of the System 3 resin.
Much non-boat-building activities tomorrow so not much will get done.
3.5 Hours