The John Boat, Faith, Fishing, and my Boat Build!

In this video, I finish sanding out the stock in preparation for staining. However, as I discovered, this particular piece of wood did not like lighter color stain, so I ended up having to go to a darker color.

More drone footage recorded over the Halifax River in Port Orange, Florda. @https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DTi5UKslU&t=613s As for the boat build: Fairing out the hull is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. Slow and steady wins this race, as if I have a choice!

Removing the damage took time, but it was well worth it. I'll be able to refinish this stock and when I'm done, it'll look better than new!

This is a project that's been on the back burner as my boat build has been taking up most of my time. But I've been wanting to get this stock repaired and refinished for quite a while, and now is as good a time as any!

Still a lot of fairing and sanding to do to get the hull ready for paint, but glory halelujah, I finally got just enough of a break from the heat to finish the fiberglass!

Last summer's near record heat made it tough. 2022 was right there with 2011 as the second hottest summer on record, second only to the brutally hot summer of 1980 (which I remember well and people still talk about), and it made it difficult to spend any significant amount of time working on the boat. All I could do was wait for heat to subside just a bit so I could finish the rest of the fiberglass work, though I did manage to start fairing out the finished side of the boat with the micro-balloon and resin fairing compound.

I took advantage of a very brief dip in the termperature this past weekend to lay down fiberglass on one side of the hull. Now I'm waiting for the next break from the extreme high termperatures so I can get the other side done.

Well, I got the bottom ready for the last layer of fiberglass cloth, but the summer heat won out. Also, check out my son's latest drone video from Port Orange, Florida as he continues his drone flight training! Link is in the comments section down below! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKH0HSrz9OM

The strakes are all but done now and in this video, I record nearly all the process of fairing them out and covering them with the first layer of fiberglass.

Yes, it takes time, but I want things done right. So I threw out the strakes I made last year and started over. The new ones look a lot better. Plus, check out my son's video of some semi-sunken boats in the Halifax river near Port Orange, Florida. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpJAdNuaNB8&t=68s

I completed laying down the first layer of fiberglass on the outer hull. The final layer will go on next, and then it will be time to fair out the fiberglass and start painting.

It felt like it's took forever to get to this point, but the fiberglass work on the bottom of the hull begins!

I published this video on YouTube right after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. And we still need to remember the families in our prayers. I started the video by sharing my thoughts on what I believe is the primary reason for the sort of evil that we witnessed that day, and no, guns are NOT to blame. As I explained, the real problem is the ever increasing denial and rejection of God in America today.

I was running on the edge of disaster in that last video when I laminated such a large piece of fabric at one time. To keep that from happening again, I needed to come with a slightly different approach to laying down the fiberglass fabric. While it's a little more time consuming, cutting the fabric into smaller sections is a far better approach than trying to fight one big piece of cloth and racing to get it laid out before the resin cures.

Life throws us curves and admittedly, much of what I had going on at that time was of my own making. I alluded to some issues that were going on in the video prior to this. We're human, and we all make mistakes. But there was, and still is, the need to finish the boat and get back on the water in order to start publishing fishing content. So I just had to push through the "stuff" and get back on the boat build.

Scraping the edges of the fiberglass tape I put down in the previous video. It's a chore, but it has to get done. And as I alluded to at the end of the video, there were some issues I had to deal with at the time, but those have been resolved.

Now that the float pods are done, I can get back to the fiberglass work, starting with the corners. Also, please check out my blog that I refer to at the end of the video, Tools For Christian Living at wordpress.com. toolsforchristianliving.wordpress.com/2022/04/20/face-to-face-with-covid/

The floatation pods are done! Time to clean up and get ready to lay down some fiberglass!

In spite of a camcorder malfunction, I take you through the assembly and near completion of the float pods. There's a lot of finish sanding to be done, but we're almost there.

I want to make sure the float pods remain rigid, which will reduce the chances of them developing stress related cracks. To accomplish that, they need internal bracing.

Just rockin' on with float pods, though I do need to pick up the pace since I want to get the hull fiberglass work done ASAP!

The plywood boxes that actually make up the float pods need something to attach to. So step 1 - attach pieces to the stern for the pods to attach to.

Between my illness and a very unusually long and cold winter (for this part of the country), I was not able to get anything done on the boat since early January of 2022. On top of that, there was more freezing weather on the way - it was the middle of March when I recorded this by the way - and that just added to my frustration.

I spent over a week in the hospital prior to recording this video and it was the first video I was able to record and upload after they sent me home. I was very sick there for a while. It did take time to regain enough strength to start working on the boat again. So I just opened up that big box that FedEx dropped off at my house!

I didn't know it was going to get as cold as it did the night I bonded those test strips to that scrap piece of plywood. In fact, it was way colder than forecast as temps got down in the upper teens with the air temp in the garage in the mid 40s. The effect on the epoxy resin was detrimental. You just have to wait for warmer temps.