Gunwales and Breast Hook

Gluing up a pair of gunwales.  Despite the designer's suggestion to use matching wood for the gunwales, breast hook and transom knees, I have leftover african mahogany for the rails and gunwales, and white oak for the breast hook and knees.  If it looks too funny, I will make everything white oak.

Breast hook blank clamped up.

My helper is cleaning the dust out of the interior after a lot of scraping and sanding.  I'm happy with the appearance of the exterior of the hull, but the laps on the interior are not perfect, mostly because of a few mistakes I made when beveling the laps.  I am getting it cleaned up slowly.

Helper 2 keeps watch from the other boat.

Trimmed Transom

I had the nerve to trim the top of the transom today.  My jigsaw is cheap and my skill with a jigsaw is in need.  With that in mind, I cut a very wavy line about an eighth of an inch outside of the designed curve.  I was happy to find that a rough pass with a belt sander smoothed it out considerably, and a pass with a flexible sanding board really brought it down to a nice curve right on the line.  It may still need a bit of help, but I'm just happy that I didn't cause any real damage.

Turning Over

I fit the outer stem and rails without a lot a pictures because it is a little bit of an awkward task to put the rails on with bedding compound all over the gloves and no one else was around at the time.

Soon afterward I could not wait to turn the boat over.  The hoist is overkill, the hull is very light right now, but it made it easy.

First view from new angles.

Outside for a few more shots.

This is a hard angle to be judged on.  Nothing has been cleaned up yet, but the angle really brings out any asymmetry and unfair curves.

The Outbone

Planking is complete.  Here I am getting out the keel using battens.  I cut close to the batten with a circular saw.  The remainder is planed down by hand.  That could be done with the router, but my routing skills plus white oak always seems to spell trouble.  Planing down to the batten really doesn't take long.

Keel, feeling at home.

Here is a first try at getting the rails on.

more planking

All but the sheer plank is installed.  

spiling

Well, I thought I had gotten pretty good at spiling and in fact, I love the planking phase and finding the shapes of the planks is just really fun to me.  Planks 1-4 came out perfectly, but when I cut out plank number 5, it didn't fit at all.  Not even close.  The frustration in such a moment is pretty intense, but I have built a few boats now and so have come to this place before.  I just let it go and cleaned up  for the night.  Here are some shots of the first four planks in place.

In addition to wasting some wood by cutting a bad plank, I had also wasted wood in my first set of panels because I could not fit plank no. 3 onto it.  So, I still had some serious plywood left, but not long enough for plank 5, so I scarfed some extra leftovers onto it, as seen below.

I then worked on my spiling technique.  I spliled plank 5 onto plywood scraps several times and each time came up with something different (very disappointing).   I finally determined that the spiling pattern has to be placed on the molds at pretty much the exact same angle that the plank will lie.  This sounds obvious, but with the angle between plank 4 and 5, the pattern wants to project out so that it doesn't contact the molds on the bottom edge (towards the floor).  If you let the pattern do this, it has a huge affect on the shape of the plank.  The pattern must lay flat against all of the molds.  Obvious, but apparently not to me at first.  Here is the elusive plank 5 as it is cut and placed.