Bow and Stern

Today Claire gave me the gift of time. In other words, I got out of all kinds of baby duties, and all kinds of diapers. It's nice to be home though where I can hang out with them whenever I like.

I have completed boat forms to show for my time, which means the next step is to start laying out the hull. I'm really looking forward to this, because to finally be doing that is to make this dream a reality. Now the real work can start.

Attaching the forms to the strongback was tricky work at first, since I had to figure out through some hard knocks that I needed a tighter grain for the "cleats" in order to prevent cracking from driving screws. You can see them in this picture; I used drywall screws to attach them.

As you can see from above, I flipped the forms around for the stern of the boat, because the paper has reference lines on it used to sight along for alignment. Here's the bow, which shows off the job I did tapering the bow.

Both the bow and stern have a taper, and there's no fence, jig, form or line to follow with a saw or anything. First I used a chamfer bit on my router and cut both sides, then I used my block plane and rasp plane to clean the angle, an finally a bit of sanding brought it to a point. Many thanks to Marc and Cyn for the awesome plane, it really works great.

The tiny forms at the ends are attached with hot glue, which worked like a charm. Here's the completed stern:

In order to take a picture of the whole thing I had to stand way back.

This 14' boat is about 7 feet less than the width of our townhouse. The black panel in the background is where our double french doors are, so you can see better how I'll be able to get this out.