Projects

During the past three days I glued gunwales and stringers to the hulls. The gunwales required a lot of bending so that they would fit to the side panels. This meant that they needed to be screwed to ply so that they would keep their bent form. I started by placing the screws to correct places so that the screws just need to be tighten:

After the screws were prepared I just applied the epox and then bent the gunwale to shape and tightened the screws. The gunwale is bent quite much where rear deck is connected to the main deck.

The stringers were glued in similar manner as the gunwales (they were only easier because they didn’t need to be bent).

The gunwales and stringers are made from wrc (western red cedar, “jättiläistuija” in Finnish). I had some problems finding wrc in Finland, in local woodshops nobody seemed to know what I was looking for. Luckily I found out that wrc was a high end sauna bench material, it seems to smell nice when it’s wet, we noticed that when bringing it home in poring rain 😉 Btw, couple of boards of wrc were as expensive as couple of sheets Okume ply…

I cut gunwales and stringers with bandsaw to almost correct size and then used plane and sandpaper to trim them to correct size. Some tapering was needed because I didn’t have proper sawing table, thus the outcome wasn’t perfectly straight.

The keel panels were cut from side panel leftovers:

The side panel remnant plywood was cut half so that the keel panel would be wide enough in the middle. Once again some drawing was done to plot the keel shape on plywood and then it was cut out. Final touches were done with plane and sandpaper. Resulting keel panels lying on top of side panels:

Most of the work was done yesterday, today I just did the final trimming.

Today I did final cuts on side panels:

The side panels were also trimmed to be symmetrical:

The cutting and trimming took only 10 hours. At this point there hasn’t been any problems.

Earlier this week I trimmed the hull sheets to fit together and glued them together with epox. Now we have two huge pieces of plywood that cannot be fitted anywhere. 🙂 Today I did a lot of drawing i.e. plot out the hull shapes:

I also started to cut the side panels out of the sheets with jigsaw: