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A useful trick especially if you are short on long work benches or church tables: Go straight to @page 100 in the hymnal and build your floor on a flat surface like your garage floor (protected with plastic) Use a router to round the edges of your butt block in advance. Use stainless square drive deck screws and you won’t have to take them out (just fill in the countersink when you do the fillet (don’t wait until the glassing step later, just sand your fillet then). Now put your teardrop floor on four 8″ high cinder blocks padded with towels ( do the same for the camper later when it is turned upright). Buying four cement blocks is cheap and easier than making 8″ high saw horses. Now cover your floor with plastic and use it (and two more cinder blocks for end support) to glue a of your panel puzzle joints.
A little-known fact is that stainless steel actually rusts when it is not surrounded by oxygen–the opposite of most ferrous metals. In marine environments, stainless steel parts below the waterline have been found to rust. You can look this up if you wish, e.g., https://www.polymersolutions.com/blog/why-does-stainless-steel-rust/ . I have experimented with this by submerging stainless steel in water and rust definitely formed.
That being said, I don’t think it matters if the screws rust inside the epoxy-covered wood anyway. Once the glue sets they are not adding much if any structural strength. So why not just use drywall screws and cover them with the fillet material instead? In my case, I did remove them since they are no longer needed. But, in the past I have left non-stainless steel screws and brads inside epoxy-encapsulated boats for years with no ill effects. They may or may not have rusted inside the wood, but so what?
I believe you are not correct about rust and encapsulated stainless fasteners. This is ,I admit a complicated and controversial subject. It has to do with activated or passivated stainless. Rust by definition is oxidation and requires oxygen. First I will say that I simply prefer working with stainless, but have buried sheetrock screws in centerboards that spent years at a time immersed in sea water then uncovered them years later while rebuilding the centerboards – and found zero corrosion. Most sources discussing stainless corrosion refer to “crevice” corrosion (which is why exposed stainless gets polished) and corrosion that occurs in a half buried fastener right at the point of air/ epoxy interface. This is the corrosion I worried about 25 years ago when ” potting in” stainless fastener u bolts using Gougeon Bros epoxy per their method. I just sold the boat 3 months ago and the u bolts have not as yet corroded despite a life around seawater (electrolyte promotes galvanic corrosion). The make a long story short I don’t worry about burying any metal in wood epoxy. I do so because its a pain in the neck to fill the holes they leave. The buried fasteners do not contribute at all to the strength of a wood epoxy structure. I do use and remove sheetrock screws in cold molding. As in the teardrop floor, they are merely for clamping.
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