Planking the hull

The framework is now ready to be covered in plywood.  The hull is covered in four 6mm (approx. 1/4”) thick plywood panels: a two-piece bottom that joins at the keel, and two sides. The bottom and sides join at the chine log.

The first step is to make 16’ long plywood panels for the bottom and the sides by joining two 8’ lengths. There isn’t a lot of extra plywood so I made cardboard patterns of the side and bottom pieces.  I was very relieved to verify that the hull was symmetrical (i.e. that both sides matched)  


I then laid the cardboard templates out on the actual plywood pieces to verify they fit before joining them and found that I had to join the panels at an angle for the template to fit it because of the curve of the side.  

I joined the pairs of 8’ panels into16’ panels using a scarf joint - a very shallow taper cut in the end of each panel so that they overlap about 3” at the joint to provide a large glue area for the epoxy.  I made a sled for my router to taper the sheets. I stacked the sheets with a 3” setback between them (the length of the taper) and slid the router sled with a flattening bit across and up and down it to cut the tapers:

I then epoxied the pieces end to end on the tapers to create the 16’ long sheets.  After glueing up the 16’ long panels, I installed the sides on the frames using epoxy and 3/4” silicon bronze screws every 3” along the edge. The sides didn’t have too much of a bend so i they were pretty straightforward to install.

For most of the length of the boat, the sides are trimmed flush with the chine log so the bottom can overlap the sides. Near the bow, where the hull becomes V-shaped, this transitions to a butt joint so the side and bottom panels meet on the chine log.

This required careful hand planing to get the bottom and side pieces to fit tightly. 


The final bottom plank was likewise fit in place by hand and held in with a lot of screws.


The bottom pieces had a much more severe bend to them, so I used steam from an iron and boiling water poured over a towel on the panels to help them bend.

Once the panels were installed, I trimmed all the edges flush with a hand plane, sanded them smooth, and cut out the slot for the centerboard trunk. A little more sanding and it’ll be ready for fiberglass and paint.


This feels like the biggest milestone yet!  It looks more boat-like than ever.  I just have to fiberglass, paint, flip the hull, install the deck, apply several coats of varnish, build the mast, boom, centerboard, and rudder, build and install seats and floorboards, rig it, and learn to sail! So almost done :)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome

Image
Welcome! This is the story of my Glen-L 15 sailboat build.  This is a 15’ long wooden sailboat I am building at home from a set of plans I ordered from Glen-L. It will be my first sailboat so I’m looking forward to learning to sail on it. This is what I hope it will look like when I am finished: This is my current progress: I spent a few weeks looking at several sailboat plans and chose the Glen-L15 because I wanted a traditional Bermuda rig (the classic triangle sail on either side of the mast).  Glen-L also had a long history and great reputation, an active online community, and sold hardware and rigging kits for this boat.  Construction will be plywood sheathing on a solid wood frame.  The links below are in chronological order, as they are best read The Plans My Shop Patterns and Templates 3/4” Plywood Parts Rough Cutting Wooden Frame Members Trimming Frame Members Waiting for the plywood Cutting the gussets Building the frames (finally!) Finishing up the parts The Building Form Fi
Read more

The Plans

Image
The plans were delivered quickly and included Five sheets of detailed drawings Two sheets of full size patterns for all parts A 15 page instruction book Glen-L also published a Building Plywood Boats book that I bought.  I hung up the plans to study them before I started building with a goal of being able to picture the entire build process in my head. It took a full day of reading (and re-reading) the plans to get mostly there.  The plans have a very old fashioned feel to them, which is no surprise given their age. In fact the plans had an almost familiar feel to me. Then I remembered we had a set of Popular Mechanics books when I was a kid and one of them had an article on how to build a boat out of plywood at home. I used to pore over the pictures and instructions in that article and think how fun it would be to actually build something like that. I am pretty sure now that those were Glen-L plans I was looking at way back then, albeit for a different boat (a one-man power boat to th
Read more

Building the spars

Image
The spars are the wooden “poles” that hold up the sails and consist of two pieces: the mast (the tall upright post) and the boom (the horizontal member that attaches to the mast and swings to control the angle of the main sail).    The mast is made from a 22’ long piece of 3” x 4” Sitka spruce. It is tear drop shaped in cross section and tapered getting narrower at the top, so I will have to shape it out of a rectangular board. Sitka spruce was hard to find.  The only place I could find it was a boat building store near Toronto, Noah’s Marine, which is about a three hour drive and in a different country.  Luckily I had to drive to Toronto anyway so I stopped on the way. Even then, I couldn’t find a piece big enough to make the mast out of one piece (which I expected), so I had to make it out of several pieces. I bought 6 boards each about 1” thick by 4” wide by 12’ long, which I spliced in pairs to make three 22’ long lengths that I’ll stack and glue to make a single 3” x 4” x 22’ long
Read more