What a tool!

No, not a metaphorical tool like Urban Meyer and his recent example of just-shy-of-egregiously-bad-sportsmanship in the manner in which he called a last second time out as Auburn was kicking a field goal to close the deal on a well-deserved win, although that's pretty much how I feel about him. No, I mean a real tool.

I've been struggling with what to do about the sloppy areas on the side of the kayak where poorly cut layers of fiberglass cloth caused unsightly ridges and threads in the epoxy coating. I tried smoothing them out with the power sander, but it was too much tool for the job and sanded all the way through to bare wood in seconds. Hand sanding wasn't much better, although it took a second or two longer to achieve the identical undesirable result. The builders manual hinted that a lot of builders have found a carbide scraper to be useful for clearing up those edges. Having never heard of such a tool, I resorted to Google. Easily found, but priced at $11 or so, with $8 shipping.

I thought that I might be able to avoid the shipping charge by finding one at Sears, and that actually worked out. Very well, in fact, because Sears only wanted $3.99 for it. Sweet! It works, too, although the blade dulls very quickly.

Today's job was to remove the masking tape that I used to keep epoxy from dripping down the sides of the hull and running onto the deck. It worked, but in some places the epoxy actually glued the tape to the hull:



The scraper did a great job of removing the pieces of tape that I couldn't pull off:





Larger areas were easier to do with the razor knife:





Once the tape was all off, the hand sander was used to smooth out the edge where the deck layer of glass will overlay it:



It's now ready for the top cover of glass: