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.

Planking continued

I am on the 3rd plank now and I am sold on the idea of the clamping batten.

There are a number of different ways to produce glued-lapstrake boats.  On my last boat, internal stringers were fitted where the planks were lapped.  These make it easier to get a fair curve in the laps, but the stringers are a lot of work and they become a permanent part of the boat, making the interior very complicated to sand and paint.

Another tactic is to use plywood clamps.  Basically, the clamps are pieces of plywood with a v-shape cut out of them that wedges the two planks together.  I haven't tried that approach.  The benefit would be that it leaves a very clean interior and a completely untouched (no holes) hull.  

The clamping batten that John Brooks suggests is basically an external, temporary stringer that pulls the lap into a very nice fair curve and at the same time, clamps the length of the lap pretty evenly.  It pretty much has the same effect as using the internal stringer, but it doesn't become an unpleasant, permanent fixture in the boat.  The only drawback is that it leaves some screw holes in the hull.  Filling these with epoxy is much easier than dealing with the internal stringers.  With regard to using the plywood clamps, I'm not sure how they would help pull the lap joint into a nice fair curve unless there are a large number of them.

In any case, nice boats have been made with all of these methods and many more.  For now, I really like glued laps with the clamping battens.

Starting to plank

Before planking, I had to check on the outer stem with new bevels.  Haven't decided yet exactly what to do with the transition from bevel to square stemhead.

My first spiling pattern was a little too flimsy.  It worked, but I made a better one later.

I'm trying to use every technique that John suggests, including the layout of the planks with battens.  Well, I've done that before, but had never used a router with flush-trim bit to cut a perfect curve into two planks at once before (after cutting close to the batten with a circular saw).  This produces really nice results.

My first try tacking it on.

Now both of them.

Cut the gains now, before gluing.

I have over-beveled a couple of areas of the keelson, so I really piled on the epoxy to fill the gaps.

Garboard is glued on.

I rigged up some crazy clamps to pull the garboard into the transom, but found that the enormous amount of stress that it puts on the building jig and transom is not good.  John's suggestion to use screws about 1 inch apart works much better.  However, if you don't carefully follow his additional advice about screw placement and orientation, depth of countersink, and carefully spreading the load out over several screws as you bend the plank, there will be trouble.  I had some trouble and finished with this.

I can't bring myself to post the picture of the swiss cheese that I made of the plank where the clamping screws go in.  I think it will all be ok when cleaned up.

On to the second plank.  My new spiling pattern is a little more robust, and this plank came out pretty much right on.

John's book has a section on how to use plywood efficiently for the planking.  On plank 2, I found out that he isn't messing around.  I could just barely fit the plank onto the plywood blanks produced by his instructions.  The transom end of this plank hangs over 1/4 inch, and the stem end just barely makes it.  I guess that is called "cutting it close".

I can't help but start to plane the bottom for the keel.  Once I started, I noticed that it is awkward, and would be much easier to do if you wait until the boat is planked up and then climb on top of it. In any case, it is done now.

Just letting the 1/2" oak keel get an idea of where it will be for the next few years.