While this boat will have a strip planked hull with a fiberglass/epoxy outer layer, the interior of the boat has all the ribs of the original and no fiberglass.

The first step is lofting and making 13 rib patterns. Each rib is actually a pair of half ribs - there are 66 in the boat. From those patterns I made 13 bending forms from plywood. The ribs are all bent laminations made from thin slats of cyprus. Cyprus is light and strong, and bends well. It also looks great with a clear finish.

Here is one of the glue ups. Since the boat is symmetric fore and aft, there are four of each of the half ribs. This blank is wide enough for all four. Some of the bends were extreme enough that I steam bent the strips before I glued them together. They are glued with thickened WEST epoxy.

Some of the ribs.

The half ribs will all be attached to the bottom board. It is also cyprus and not quite shaped in this photo. Most, but not all, of the ribs are laying about on my benc.

The ribs are all fastened to the bottom board with two brass screws. Since the ribs are only 5/16" thick, this resulted in an afternoon of very careful drilling pilot holes. For this operation I clamped the bottom board vertically above my bench so I could get to both sides of the boat.

All the ribs on that can go on right now. The last ribs at each end don't have 'feet' so they have to go on later. While this clamping arrangement looks completely slapdash, it was actually very stable. You may notice that the ribs are not all perfectly in line with each other. A surprisingly small error in the foot of a rib can cause this. All of these errors wree corrected later.

The building form. This is a 14' laminated MDF beam cut to a very slight arc. When the boat frame is fastened to it, the curve will put the right amount of rocker in the boat. Since the bottom board needs to rest directly on this beam, it needs a few slots for the ribs.

A simple router jig and a bit of plunge routing solved this problem. I tied the shop vac hose to the jig which cut out about 95% of the mess.

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