Construction Journal

It's been a while since I posted, and a lot's been done, with puzzlingly little progress to show for it. First I thought I'd give you a peek at my first attempt at a stem pieced together from parts. This approach was really hard to make work for an amateur-amateur because of the tricky mating surfaces. Had I cut the entire stem from boards glued at a 90 degree angle I think I could have made it work, but I chose instead to go with what one would think is the more difficult approach, a laminated stem.

This picture shows the laminated stem I made, along with the outer stem that I'm laying up using the inner stem as a form. To make the stem I glued two 36 inch long 1x4 planks face to face. I then used a table saw to cut 3/32" wide strips. I then taped the plans to a sheet of plywood and screwed some pine 2x2 blocks to the sheet along the line of the stem. I slopped epoxy on each face of all of the strips and pulled them around the blocks and applied a shit-pot full of clamps. The book says that this process is messy, and they are absolutely correct. Gloves, while difficult to do any work in, are highly recommend, otherwise your hands will be absolutely coated in epoxy.

I've glued up the planks for the transom and done a cursory shaping and planing, and now I'm testing for fit and fairness. I first cut the transom using the fair curve lines from the plans, neglecting the teeny-tiny little note that says to cut the transom to the inside facing of the planks and not the lines. To fix it I had to cut off the bottom of the transom, glue a new plank and cut it.

I've spent what seems like days and days measuring and eyeballing the lines of the hog, which is a 2" wide piece of mahogany the forms the backbone of the boat. This was one piece but to get it to form to the curve of the bottom I actually cut it into two 2" X 3/8" pieces, which I am gluing back together now. Up to this point I could if need be backtrack a few steps if I screw something up, but now I'm at the point where this becomes much more difficult.