Chines and Gunwales, ahoy!

So, since last time I was online posting about nonsense, I've done a whole lot more nonsense. Luckily, I had OH&S cat Ember to ensure I was following correct safety guidelines and that the timber I was ripping for my chines and stringers was to plan.

She's my foreman, more or less. I wasn't able to get the full 5.5m lengths in the Hoop Pine, so I wound up needing to scarf timbers together to get full length. I won't go into it because there are many who already have covered the topic, but basically it involves angled cuts on both timbers to join that overlap and are glued to result in 1 long timber.

I used a horribly unsafe tablesaw jig to do so. I convinced my lady friend and my OH&S cat it was safe. My thumbs are still attatched. Overall, I got it done without hassle.

Once that was done, they go onto the boat like so. To do this you have to bevel the slots in the frames, and bevel the chine at the stem. I found this hard. It isn't, I was just particularly slow the day I tried to do the first one, and I picked the one with the most bend possible to start with. I broke the first chine I tried to attach, but got better as I went. As you can see, I at least got 2 on. Eventually, each side has two layers.

Getting them on was intense though. I swore. At least twice. There is a significant amount of twist in the dry timber between frame 1 and stem, as you can see below. Try bending this by hand and drilling in screws at the same time.

And yet making it line up perfectly to the stem like this.

Yeah. Not easy. Enter the frame torturing jig that I remembered from some dim past browsing of the web.

A knee on this little beauty will keep everything bent, in line and perfectly secure leaving your hands free to drill away! It feels somewhat crude, cheap and nasty to use, but doing it solo I couldn't really think of any other way to do it.

The chines are left oversize at the back and trimmed down later. As you can see, 2 layers now.

And a whole lot of clamps....

A lot.

After this is all done, she winds up looking something like this:

So this looks nice. She even looks mostly symmetrical. I've now started drilling out the temporary screw holes and filling them with dowels. I've also trimmed the overhang at the transom.

Next up, install the stringers and centrecase, then I fair the chines and keelson to accept the plywood hull. Getting closer and closer to flip-day.