Setting Up and Planking

Building Form, Stern View

I'm very lucky to have room to build a 19' boat in a part of my professionally equipped woodshop. This covered deck houses rough lumber, two jointers, and a planer. We've recently cleared another space on the property and much of the excess junk will soon be stored there.

Building Form, Bow View

The building form was constructed according to the drawings, although everything is a bit beefier. The main supports are 2x6s and the station molds are all 3/4 plywood (instead of the specified 1/2 inch). Even so the whole construct was too floppy until I added the horizontal braces between the station molds (a trick I picked up on the web). Mr. Oughtred supplies full scale drawings of the stations and stems so no lofting is required. As fun as lofting can be, I appreciated the time savings. The fore and aft inner stems are laminated Honduras mahogany and the keelson was gotten out of a very nice 14' mahogany plank. The battens were scarfed up out of 4' lengths of 3/8" square cherry left over from a furniture project. They have worked out really well but will be pretty much trashed by the end of the project. That's all right - from scrap they came and to scrap they will go!

Outer Stems

The outer stems were laminated up over the inner stems. The forward outer stem is composed of 13 layers of mahogany. They are all cleaned up in this photo, but that glue-up was a huge mess of epoxy. Speaking of epoxy, I am using the tried and true WEST System, mostly because I am already familiar with it and we had a bunch of WEST products in the shop already.

Scarfing Plywood

I am planking my boat with 3/8" occume plywood from Harbor Sales in Maryland. For those of you in the Mid-Atlantic states (and Ohio) shipping is free! I only mention it because I was very happily surprised. I scarfed the plywood for the garboards with a power planer. This worked fairly well, but I had to spend a fair amount of time with a jack plane making it all even. After that, I bought the scarfing jig WEST sells for cicular saws. When it arrived I felt a bit silly having paid $57 for two pieces of bent metal and some bolts, but it has saved me several hours of work so far. It's totally worth it, as far as I'm concerned.

First Garboard

This isn't much of a photo. It was a dreary, wet day and the garboard was curling every which way. Still, the spiling worked (I did make a pattern first) and it fit....

Garboards, Bow View

We were really thrilled to be able to take this picture. For the first time it started to look just a little bit like a boat! We notched the garboards (roughly) for the centerboard trunk so we could find it easily later.

Click here to follow along the rest of the planking.