Yesterday I glued more blocks onto the daggers. There are 4 blocks forward of the spine and 8 blocks aft of it. The 4 blocks forward run the full length of the board but the shape after the spine has a triangle in the top right corner removed so the board is narrower fore to aft in a triangular shape to reduce weight and make the shape above the deck when raised smaller for better vision so rather than run the blocks all the way up on the back section and then cut them away and throw the foam away I opted to pre shape the dagger by staggering the blocks to match the shape to save on that foam.

I am also finding it easier to glue a few blocks to each other then glue that stack of set blocks to the beam so that I only have one glued join to worry about when working on the ever growing dagger, because as it gets taller it gets harder to work on so gluing and setting in place a number of wet glue blocks is getting more difficult.

So today I have glued all but one glue line on the last dagger together, so 1 dagger (pictured) has all of the foam glued in place and the other has just one more join to go. The reason the last block glue is not yet on, besides running out of time today, is that I have a slight bow in the middle of the second dagger so while the glue is pretty set it is still a little green so I thought I would lay the dagger on the flat bench high middle up and put a heavy weight on the middle overnight to see if it takes the bow out, then if it does (even a little) I can glue the last block on straight and hopefully avoid having to back fill with foam any trough left when I run the router over the block. If there is enough overhang of foam over where the shape guide sits on the block then the router will hit the board all over and correctly shape (and cut out the highs and lows of the bow) the board and no further foam will be needed. So the bow certainly isn’t terminal and may not even signify more work is needed as the shaping may take care of it.

Hopefully tomorrow I will get the second dagger glued and the jig made or at least the detail of it worked out so that I can get to shaping the daggers soon.