Day 12 - Assembling the rudder and touching up the deck

The objective for today is to assemble the rudder. This involves bending the rudder post to match the shape of the slot in the rudder halves and then epoxying the two halves together with the rudder post. I simply used two needle nose pliers to shape the "j" shape in the rudder post. By not shaping it perfectly, there is a little friction between the post and the rudder which actually helps hold it in place:

OK, this is overkill, but if you've got em, use em. For clamping the two rudder halves together, anything that provides some clapping force will work, even a stack of books. I opted for my good wood clamps from the shop. 

I used a spare block of wood on the bottom, with a piece of wax paper so epoxy won't stick to wood. I am also going to use a second board to apply clamping force across the rudder but not totally covering it. The reason will be clear in a moment:

The instructions call for using pus pins for proper alignment of the halves. This is important if your clamping setup is not stable or does not apply pressure in a controlled way that causes no shifting of the two halves due to uneven clamping pressure:

Here you can see the rudder halves manually aligned (I ditched the push pins), the rudder post placed in the midline of the two halves and supported by a scrap wood piece that is the same thickness as the rudder halves and a push pin to hold the end of the rudder post down. I filled the groove with epoxy and assured that the rudder post was still in the midline of the two halves:

Another view:

And another. Notice that the epoxy is a bit low in the groove. I will come back later to fill that in with a second pass on the epoxy:

A view from the back side:

The next several photos just show the deck and the joints between the deck strips and the dark wood putty I used to create the effect. There were some low spots and gaps in the putty so I touched that up. See Day 6 for details about the effect and my approach to the deck.