Scarfing the plywood

Getting a stack of plywood ready to scarf for the planking.  

First rough pass with plane.  

Almost finished.  This method of doing a whole stack of ply at the same time is so much better than the ways that I have tried it in the past.  I can't believe that I now have all of the scarfing out of the way, as long as I don't mess up any of the planks, that is.  It didn't really take long at all to plane this stack down.

Ready for some glue.

Joint is painted with straight epoxy first, then one side is coated with thickened epoxy.  I made my batch a little thicker than I should have for this task (not shown in these images).  It should be thin enough to squeeze out from the tight joint easily.  I read the "pancake batter" description in John's book just after finishing gluing them up!  In any case, they came out better than any I've done in the past.

The whole stack is clamped down with a board.

After congratulating myself for how easily I accomplished this, I realized that I was confused while lining up each layer, and I found that my clamp was not placed directly above all of the scarfs.  I then added another board and put some very heavy flat concrete blocks on it and hoped it would clamp everything.  It all turned out ok, but could have been executed a little better.

Oops!

My keelson is too skinny!  John Brooks was very nice and supportive when he emailed that my keelson was too skinny at the transom.  Here is what it looked like before corrective surgery.

I'm not sure how I determined the width of the keelson at the transom, but I think I aimed for the width of the bottom of the transom, then cut it a bit wide just in case.  But, doing that left little room for the bevel, so I had a very small amount of landing for the plank near the transom.  John very graciously pointed out that the top of the keelson (the side facing the ground now) should be as wide as the transom where the two meet.  Indeed, the plans show the keelson with a dashed line on the transom drawing, so I should have known that, but I missed it.  So, this is why we like epoxy:  

Glue applied.

Frankenstein keelson.  (not sure anyone ever put those words together before)

Inside is ugly, but will be cleaned up and is not in a highly visible part of the interior.

Trimmed down now.  More detail work to do, but looks like it is basically fixed.

Laminating the outer stem

I made a crude jig for laminating the outer stem.  Here is a dry run to test it out.

Pieces of white oak laid out and ready to glue.

Spreading on the thickened epoxy after letting the straight epoxy soak into the wood for a bit.  I've always heard that white oak doesn't glue well with epoxy, but so far I haven't had any problems with it.

My helper took a few pictures while I was glueing.  Unfortunately her vantage point is a little low.

Using a mallet and piece of wood to try to get the pieces flattened down and even with each other.

I cleaned up the top side pretty well, but the bottom will be a mess of hardened epoxy when it dries.

I was relieved to find that waxing the jig with paste wax really did keep the wood from getting stuck to the jig.  It lifted right off with no problem.

I scraped off the epoxy with a sharp paint scraper, then planed it smooth with a block plane.  After struggling with trying to plane the African Mahogany, the white oak was a breeze, with nice paper thin shavings appearing at the mouth of the plane.

Looks like it will fit.

Again, trying it on for size after roughly shaping the outer stem some.  Still need to cut the bevels into it.

Shaping the Keelson

The project is moving along very quickly...after building a few boats, it seems that most of the tasks are familiar to me...that and having John's book and very clear and complete set of plans also helps a lot.  I never thought I'd be getting the boat ready for planking in just 3 weeks.

Here is the keelson after it has been beveled.  It isn't perfect, but I think it will do.  

I re-drew the original rabbet lines in after they mostly disappeared during my sloppy trimming.

Taper to the transom came out pretty good.  I can't imagine how I'm going to bend a piece of plywood into that shape for the garboard plank.

I slapped a piece of 1/8" ply onto it to see if the bevel is going to work.  Seems like it will be fine.

Checking the shape

Probably getting ahead of myself a little, but I had to check the shape with some battens.  This was very useful, I found a couple of spots where I had missed marking some of the plank landings.  Just a couple of the battens needed a little adjustment, most likely because of a mistake when I was marking the molds.

In addition to sighting down the length of the battens to check for fairness, I try to view the boat from as many vantage points as possible.  The problem with building upside down is that most of your views of the form are from what will be underwater when the boat is floating.  Sometimes, the curves can look strange from that angle, and it doesn't matter since no one ever views it like that.  So, I often try to see what it looks like by turning my head upside down and viewing from very low to the ground.  This gives you a pretty good idea of what the boat will look like.  This one is looking pretty nice to me so far.

View from aft.

Transom is screwed to blocks once the proper position is found.