Assembly continued, 5 Dec 2006, #6 of 11.

I am at a loss here as to how much detail I need to explain in the restoring process. Words are boring, but I cannot always show a picture. The boat hull had to be kept perfectly level athwartships from stem to stern. In other words, no twist. Now there is a word. It means from one side to the other. You saw yellow levels in one of the pictures. Twist would cause the boat to want to constantly turn.

The bottom also had to be perfectly flat length wise for the last 6 feet of the boat. If it were not flat, it may dig the nose into the water, causing excess drag and erratic turns. Or porpoising, a constant movement of the nose up and down.

This took constant checking of my work, and a term called fairing. I laid my long flat level on the frames and then ground some wood off, or glued a thin piece on to keep every thing proper.

We now are going to use the planks we took off back in May. The pattern planks. Here you see three of them temporarily in place. The boards we buy are not long enough to go the full length of the boat.

The spot they are joined together is called the butt joint. There must be a butt block placed under that joint, You see some of them here.

Here I am rubbering them into place.

I have steamed two planks, S1 & S3, and clamped them in place.

The next two P2 & P4 are steamed and clamped.

After all of them are steamed, clamped, allowed to cool and removed and set aside, the next step is the first layer of planks, remember the diagonal ones? But in this case, they are replaced with marine plywood. At this stage, I must have the boat square in relation to the stern. I measured from a point on the stem to each corner of the stern, applied a little correction with a brace, and rubbered and screwed the plywood into place.




You can see the brown rubber in the last photo above. This rubber is used between all wood connections. It not only glues the wood together, it makes everything totally water proof.

The last group of pictures were taken on 5 Jan 2007. I had worked 30 weeks and 575 hours during 2006. My log shows I worked from 1 to 7 hours a day, some days zero hours. I spent 7 weeks in the harvest from 14 July to 1 September. After that I worked some every week until the end of the year.

Then I dry fit the planks previously formed into place over the plywood covered hull. If I had put the plywood on first, I would have had nothing to clamp the planks to, to bend them over the hull.

The planks are in place and all the screw holes pre-drilled. You can see there are a lot of screws. About 3500 of them used in the boat.

You can see the notes I wrote to myself for later reference. Also, each plank had a number, from the keel out and from the chine up. P4R means Port #4 Rear. The date is now 19 Jan 2007.

The dry-fitted planks are then removed, laid on a saw horse, and a sealer call Clear Epoxy Penetrating Sealer (CEPS) is applied. This stuff soaks into the wood and it allows no water to penetrate, thus protecting the wood from rot. It also makes all glues, rubber, paint, etc adhere very tightly. You can see that all the holes are filled with the new screws.

I then apply a generous coat of rubber on the plywood and the plank and screw it onto the boat, two on each side at a time. This is one of the operations I needed help on. My nephew Jim came, but only after I promised to take his family water skiing. Just joking.


The bottom planking is complete. It's 9 Feb. 2007.

Next is painting the bottom.