Working in the basement now

 It's winter now in Cleveland and it costs too much to heat the garage, so I've moved my work into the basement.  Needless to say, I can only work on projects that I can actually get back up the basement stairs.  The project for this week is to finish the keel.  

In an earlier post, I described how I rough-shaped the keel out of Mahogany and then reinforced its sides with unidirectional carbon fiber.  I now need to fair the keel to get the NACA 0012shape that I'm looking for.  I did a pretty good job with the initial rough shaping, but when I cut a groove for the carbon fiber, some of the "fairness" of the foil was lost.  In order to get back the NACA shape, I decided to build a screed box so that I could just drag a template with the NACA 0012 shape over it and apply fairing compound in a more methodical way.  The picture below shows the template that I created.  The shape came from a plot that I made in Microsoft Excel which I then transferred onto 1/4" birch plywood.  I then cut out the foil shape and smoothed the edges with sand paper.