Now comes the messy part. You’ve got all 16 planks fit. You’ve glued in all your intermediate frames to provide additional screwing locations between frames. You’ve glued in all the butt blocks to make the splice joints at the ends of two planks in the same strake. It’s time to glue the bottom planks down permanently.
If you don’t think coating the entire side of a 16 foot plank with glue, and then placing it in a puddle of glue of matching size and shape on the boat is messy, try it sometime. And if that’s not messy enough for you, get a year and a half old dog involved in the process!
We used 3M 5200 adhesive to glue the garboard to the keel because of its greater elongation than epoxy. This joint tends to work a bit more than the others because of the size of the solid lumber members, so an adhesive with a bit more “give” is called for. But spreading 5200 is about like spreading bubble-gum. So the remainder of the bottom planks are fastened with epoxy (and a lot of screws).
The messiness aside, it’s a pretty straightforward, though time-consuming process. I used a 1/8″ notched trowel to spread an even coating of glue on both the plank and the inner ply layer of the boat. Then carefully placed the plank on the boat, using the locator screws from the fitting process to get the plank exactly in position.
Once the locator screws were tight, I just drilled a lot more screw holes and put the screws in. Each screw was dipped in 5200 before being driven to provide a lubricant, and to seal the screw hole.
I’m pleased with the shape of the hull. It’s eye-sweet and sea-kindly–the result of a lot of quality time spent with a batten getting the frames fair a long time back.
This is just so…COOL!
Thanks Venette. Yeah it really is starting to look like a boat again, albeit still an upside-down boat. Hope to be getting it right-side up soon!
Glad you like it! The flipping went pretty well. I didn’t even have to use many “work words”.