Today we're dealing with laminating strips across the finger joints. Prior to doing this, I whipped up some resin and added some filler to it. The plan was to fill some of the gaps in the ends of the finger joints. However, the filler I used gave the epoxy this nasty mauve color. Dutch-boy in me couldn't throw it all out, so I used it on the ends only where it won't be seen. Note that I did this about 24 hours prior to doing anything else with laminating strips, as discussed below.

The next step was to glue some thin pieces of wood together. I have these really thin strips (about 1/16" width) leftover from ripping the strips. So, I decided to glue a few of these together (three) and then use that as the stem piece. So, I glued it all together and then used packing tape to compress it tightly to the frame of the boat. I plan on letting it sit for at least 24 hours before doing anything else with the ends. This is a shot of the rear end of the boat.

And the front end of the boat.

A shot of the rear from the top. Of course, the next step will be to trim down these stem pieces. I'll probably do most of that with a spokeshave, which is a very cool tool.

Since I had nothing better to do, and since it has to be done soon anyway, I decided to start to pull the staples on the hull. This went surprisingly fast. In about an hour, I had most of the staples removed from the hull.

Here's a close-up of where the staples used to be.

And a shot of the whole hull, sans staples (apart from the taped parts on the ends and the sheer strip). Once it is planed, filled, and sanded, those pesky stapleholes will be barely noticeable.