This weekend I was looking through the remaining pile of boat pieces, and was pleased to find that they grow fewer all the time - a visible sign of progress.
Among the remaining pieces I spotted one that I had forgotten about - the cleat that supports the aft edge of the foredeck. I thought I might as well install this, and went to check the fit on the boat. I found that I had painted over the gluing area, so I first scraped that area clean. I then found that I had put some nice substantial fillets around the deck beams on the forward side of bulkhead 2, and so the cutout in the cleat would not fit.
I had a couple options at this point. I could try to remove the fillets, which would be a lot of work. I could make a new cutout in the part big enough to fit around the fillets, but that would not be very elegant. I took the third option - to form the cleat to conform to the fillets, and to do that I called into service one of several microplane rasps that I bought a little while ago.
These stainless steel rasps have lots of very sharp tiny cutting edges, and come in fine or coarse in several different profiles. They work great. The company's web side is here if you'd like more info: Microplane Rasps
Here I'm using a coarse, square profile rasp to shape the deck cleat cutout.
Here's the final result.
And here's the installed part - a perfect fit!
These tools also work great on cured epoxy.
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