Planking Delays

Boat building sucks. It's like pushing runny poo uphill with a pointy stick. I had all good intentions of having a half planked hull by this time tonight but, despite a very busy day, things didn't work out quite like that.

First up I, I took the stems off the molds to shape them in readiness for beveling. That went easily enough.

Before...



After. Too easy.



I took them back & clamped them onto the molds. Then I figured I'd take a (quick) closer look at a couple of intermediate molds, to see if I could work out why they "weren't quite right". In mounting the molds, I was always as careful & accurate as I could be but a few molds still seemed to be out by a few mm.



Anyway, after lots of time and much jiggling, batten adjusting, head scratching & measuring (nearly ALL) waterlines against the table of offsets, I finally discovered that some of the waterlines on the templates seem to be a couple of mm out in places. These appear to have combined to cause the slight anomalies with mold alignments.



Mulling over a plan of action and playing around with some of my planking stock, a simple solution occurred to me. If I just don't staple the planks at stations where the molds are a bit smaller, then the planks won't get pulled in and unfairness in the hull should be eliminated. I don't want to get bogged down with shimming/packing out the molds and besides, the strength is going to come from the glued edges anyway.

Very conscious of the huge amount of time I'd just wasted, I decided to move on with the beveling of the stems. This was fun (flat spokeshave seemed the best tool to use). I have to say, I thought it was very therapeutic, sitting there carving away. Wasn't overly skillful & I probably looked like a bit of a butcher but it turned out surprisingly ok. The only problem was that the short , fragile, vertical section broke out again (a bit too vigorous with the side pressure), so I had to glue it back in afterward. I'm holding it in position in the photos below.







Because this part took forever, when I got to working on the stern stem I decided to try something different. I marked roughly where I'd have to bevel, then removed it & took it to my sanding station (set up on the grass, so as to not fill my shed up with toxic cedar dust).
This seemed to work really well & I managed to do the whole stern stem, instead of just up to the first clamp like on the bow stem.



By the time I got all this sorted, it was late arvo & the normal family duties were calling. So I packed up & fumed quietly at the missed opportunity of finally getting some planks onto the molds. I'm back into the crappy half of my fortnightly roster, with only Tuesday next week available to try & make some headway. At least I really should be able to start planking now (after finishing off the bow stem of course). How long could it take?........

Those people out there who are experienced in the boat building world, or construction in general, are probably scoffing at my naivety in accurately projecting likely job time frames. Perhaps I'm just getting a little too impatient. It just seems such a bloody long time & so much work, before I even get to the starting point. Surely things will pick up now? Won't they?