Planking Complete

The planking is now complete. It was basically a straightforward process - cut the scarfs on the ends of the planks, cut the rebates on the bow and stern sections and then glue them in place after beveling the edge of the previous plank. Even though it was straightforward I managed to make a couple of mistakes with the scarf joints. The first mistake was that I didn't apply the clamps carefully enough on one scarf and ended up with a wide strip of exposed white epoxy. This won't look good on a clear finished boat and I am not keen on the idea of inlaying a clean piece of veneer to hide the joint - if it isn't perfectly done it will be as obvious as the white epoxy!

On the middle plank on the other side of the boat I managed to cut the two scarfs on the same side of the centre section. I had already cut the scarfs on the fore and aft sections so I had to cut the incorrect scarf off and make a new one. Cutting the scarf off lost 50mm of the plan's length; the new scarf effectively lost another 50mm. The planks in the kit are cut with some extra lengths to allow a damaged scarf to be recut but doing this would only lose part of the scarfs 50mm length. The result of this is shown here.

The only way to recover from this blunder was to and an extension to the end of the bow section. This resulted in two scarf joints being close together. This is another  nail in the coffin of the varnished boat idea and I will now paint the outside of the boat.

In this next phot the C clamps are clearly visible as are some home made screw clamps where the C clamps can't be used because there isn't enough clearance between the hull and the mold.There are also a couple of good old metal screw clamps in there and a couple of V clamps holding the planks to the stem. These V clamps simply hold by friction but only work on a shallow angle.

Here's the fully planked hull.

at this point I removed all the temporary screws holding the keel, inner stem and transom to the mold and tried to lift the hull off the mold. It wasn't easy because the squeezed out epoxy inside the hull was sticking to the sticky tape and plastic which was in turn stuck to the mold. Fortunately the protective layer of tape and plastic had done its job and I was able to lift the hull up.

While waiting for the planking glue to go off I have assembled the "buoyancy tank". This is a trapezoidal shaped box which sits on the keel in the middle of the boat with the sliding seat mounted on top of it and the outrigger arms attached to the aft end of the box. The top, bottom and ends have corner strips glued to them and finally the sides are glued on. In this photo the sides are being glued in place - a tricky clamping exercise to hold the ends of the side panels down. The tape was sufficient to pull the joints together along the long edges.

After cleaning up the box I couldn't resist a test assembly of the box, the outrigger arms and the sliding seat. Now this weird shaped box begins to make more sense. there is auite a bit more work to be done on this assembly and I will do that while waiting for the epxoy to set on the outer keel, cutwater and skeg.