It’s raining in San Francisco today, and I had an urge to blog. I began the process of gluing the bottom deck on by sanding and planing down the stringers and keel. I needed to make sure everything was level in order to create a flat gluing surface for the deck. This process took quite some time, I’d say around two weeks. To further explain why it took so long, I am a bit of a perfectionist and that paired with a procrastinator and someone who only works on this project weekends that equals a very slow boat build.

The bottom deck is about 12′ long and because it’s impossible to find a piece of marine grade plywood at 12′ in length, there needs to be a method of attaching two 8′ pieces together.  To attach these two pieces together a bit of advanced woodworking needs to be made and that comes in the form of a scarf joint.

Whats a scarf joint?

It’s simply a method of jointing two pieces of wood together end to end, by creating a surface area that strong enough to glue and hold. This diagram below is a good way of representing how it works. The only complication with this project is that the joint is very long and needs to be made into two sections because of the angle of the boat. Essentially 4 pieces all scarfed up then join those pieces so that there are 2 separate decks.

 

 

(1) Planing down all 4 of the scarf-joints.  

(2) Glueing the joints together.

(3) Making a jig to flatten out the joint. 

(4) One side completed

(5) Dry fitting and gluing the bottom deck.

(6) Creating a lap joint by planing and sanding thee attached deck ply so that the second deck ply can lay flat.

(7) Gluing the second deck to the frame.

(8) Bottom deck fully attached, ready for the next step, top stringers!