If you’re going to build a boat, it’s nice to have enough space to do it. My shop, in the background wasn’t big enough to fit the CS20 and still have room to get around. Fortunately, our backyard had an 18’x22’ concrete slab that had been poured by previous owners. I never understood what the purpose of that monstrosity was. It was just a flat spot in the middle of the yard right in the direct afternoon sun. Crazy. So I decided to cover it. Note the birdhouse. It made from scrap lumber in the style of a hollow birdsmouth mast. The sparrows love it. We get 3-4 batches of baby birds each year.
This is lofting the hull shapes onto the scarfed hull panels. It’s basically connecting the dots from the plans measurements with a long, flexible batten to get smooth, continuous curves. This was a bit trickier than I had expected since different thicknesses of battens give drastically different curves. So there’s a fair amount of just “eyeballing it” till the curve looks consistent.
Of course as soon as I had some bulkheads cut, I had to clamp them upright to start getting an idea of the general shape of the hull. The closer panel is the forward bulkhead. The bow extends about four feet further forward. The rear panel is the transom. The area a couple feet in from of it is enclosed by another bulkhead which forms the aft storage area.
Making a boat mean making lots of sawdust and wood shavings. Even an old beat-up looking plane can make a whole crapload of shavings if it’s sharp and tuned.
I scored this compass plane at an estate sale in Florida. The thin sole can be adjusted to plane a convex or concave curve with the twist of a knob. I was very proud to actually get to use it to fair out some curves on bulkheads and pieces of curved framing. Other than boatbuilding, I can’t imagine what else I would ever use it for.
As with the bulkheads, once the sides were cut to shape I had to set them upright and get a look at the basic profile. Of course the bow with be turned in to meet the bottom in a smooth curve, but you get the general idea.
Charlie would smile to know that his compass plane continues to build boats after all this time.
ReplyDeleteCharlie was my parent's next-door neighbor in Palm Coast Florida. He had built a beautiful yawl that sat at his dock on the canal for years. He bad apparently been too frail to sail it for a number of years, but he still went out there regularly to keep up the varnish work.
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