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most craft stores) before covering it with clay.  Keep the clay damp when not working with it to prevent it from drying out and cracking by covering it with a damp towel.  If the clay is too stiff, sprinkle some water over the surface of it and let it sit in a sealed container for a day or so.

You want to work the clay until it just covers the edges of the wood frames.  It's liable to be pretty lumpy at first, until you get the hang of working with it.  Old wooden spoons, wire strung between two dowels, pieces of scrap metal, and even wire cheese cutters are good tools for smoothing out and cutting the clay to get it into the right shape.  A moist paper towel brushed down the length of the hull will help you get a smooth surface.

Once you have filled in the plug with clay you are ready for fiberglass.  "What's that?" you say, "No mold release agent?"  That's the beauty part, as Ross Perot would say.  The clay is an inherent release agent.  Take some spare clay and mix it up thoroughly with water, until you have a muddy liquid about the consistency of cooking oil.  This is called a slurry, and you will brush this onto the building board around the hull form (not too thickly! A thin layer is all you need.)  Once this has had time to dry to a light dampness, lay your fiberglass cloth over the hull form, and brush SolarEZ onto it.  Depending on the complexity of the hull form, you may have to cut the cloth into shape before hand in order to get it to fit correctly.  What you want is to have a smooth surface saturated with resin, with no air bubbles visible underneath.  Take the board out into the sunlight and let the UV light cure the fiberglass.  On a bright day this only takes about 5 minutes, when cloudy it may take from 15 to 30 minutes.  If it is overcast, don't bother.  Wait until the sun comes out.  You can do this to the hull one section at a time.  It is not necessary to do the entire hull at once.

You want to build up the thickness of the hull in layers, overlapping the cloth in varied locations.  This method will give you a lot of control over how thickly built up any one section of the hull is.  I generally like to use four to five layers of cloth overall.  The bow and stern areas will tend to have more layers naturally, because the hull form in those spots generally requires you to cut multiple pieces of cloth to get them to fit right.

Once the entire hull has been glassed in, and you have build up layers to a thickness of your liking, it is time to free the hull from the plug.  Using a putty knife you should be able to work the edges of the hull loose from the board.  Once you have accomplished this, take a rubber mallet and tap moderately against the hull along its length, parallel to the surface of the building board.  After a time, this should cause the weak glue bonds of the frames to break free from the board, allowing you to remove the hull from the building board. 

What you now have is a boat full of mud and plywood.  Using a pick, pliers, etc.  you should be able to work the clay and the frames out of the hull for most part.  Save the clay, as it can be used again.  Of the forty frames, which I used for the ship in the illustration, only one broke during removal.  You can save these frames for re-use also, if you intend to build a second hull of the same ship.  Eventually you will get down to small bits and pieces of clay that are still stuck to the inside of the hull.  These will have to be worked out with water (preferably at high pressure from a hose) and a steel brush.  Eventually you will have a clean hull (put some elbow grease into it, sailor!).

For those of you who constructed your ship in halves, as long as you left enough overlap on the building board, you could use the two halves as a more traditional mold for pulling hulls.  Or

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