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.