Finishing the Dinghy Hull: The Incredible Strip Planking Transformation (Part 2) S3- E13

foreign boat building we're going to finish up the planking for Victoria install the shutter plank AKA The Whiskey Plank and start fairing the hall all of this episode of The Art of boat building [Music] we pick up where we left off and planking the bottom of the boat now one of the challenges with these old Cedar strips is that they still had some memory from being on the original Victoria so that some of them had quite a curve and a Twist to them so one of the challenges with the bottom of the boat was trying to find strips that were as straight as possible so I didn't have to completely coax them into place as I did before I use this plastic brad nailer to permanently glue and affix the strips to the stem the bulkheads and the transom as I did with the side planks I worked from Port to starboard and vice versa by doing this it helps keep the structure of the boat uniform in some cases I took these Quick Grip clamps and I switched the head around so that they became a spreader being able to push the planks into place foreign thank you foreign there are about four planks that not only needed to bend but also to twist so I put together a makeshift little steam box with some PVC pipe foreign despite the seemingly hundreds of clamps that I seem to own I still needed to purchase about 10 more of these long clamps in order to get the job done properly fortunately for me it's a good day when you have a good reason to buy new tools foreign thank you foreign foreign so I'm finally to the last plank of the boat now this particular kind of plank is called a shutter plank a shutter plank is when a plank is fitted between two planks that are already affixed to the boat the other name that this plank can have is called a whiskey Plank and that's mainly because it's a celebration of finishing the hall which is a milestone for any boat build so I'm going to get this installed and then we'll have a little celebration I put a little registration Mark here so I know when I had it in as far as it needed to go foreign Victoria well that's going to do it for me for today so I'll let this plank set up and let the glue dry and then tomorrow I'll come back and we'll start fairing the hole well now that the hull is all planked we can now get started thinking out about the fairing but before I do that there are a few questions and comments that had come up in the last episode now the first thing is about how I planked the boat and I think that I might have misled some of you when I referenced Nick shot at's book be on strip linking mainly because he's strip planking canoes or kayaks that are a bright finish a bright finish means the natural wood is showing that is not going to be the case with Victoria the end product will be fiberglassed on the inside and the outside and then it will be a painted surface mainly because the method of having exposed bright finishes is a fairly modern thing and this boat is going to be sitting on a classically built boat Arabella so it's Steve's desire that the boat be a painted finish for a couple of reasons is that a Bright finish is much harder to maintain as opposed to a painted finish it's quite easy each season to give a coat a Fresh coat of paint so now to talk about how those strips want on here they're one of the concerns was about these strips that I put here in the front now why I did that is that this front section of the boat is needs to be quite strong as you can imagine especially if Steve beaches the boat or something like that if I had taken the bottom strips here and you can see how they come they would have then come down here and ended on a small angle and that small angle would have created a little bit of a point out there which in my estimation would not have been as strong so that was one of the reasons why I did this now a lot of people thought that it's not going to be a fair boat and you can see that it is completely fair and there's absolutely no little bumps or ripples in where the station marks are so that's primarily why I strip planked the boat this way now there are some things that I would have probably done a little bit different but that's just part of the process of building a boat so one of the other issues that people were concerned about is that there are some gaps between some of the planks and the screw holes that are here now all of the wood will get a fairing compound over the top so all of these gaps would be filled with an epoxy fairing compound as well as all of these holes where the screws are will also get fairing Compound on it so that epoxy fairing compound then Sands very it actually Sands quite nicely and then over the top of that will be the fiberglass cloth and epoxy resin so one of the other questions was how much is the boat going to weigh well I've been trying to keep very close tabs on how much materials are weighing as I'm adding them to the boat and I have been projecting that the boat would weigh somewhere between 75 and 85 pounds now consequently last week one of the viewers commented about a boat that he had built that was in very similar condition so it's a comment by S Wood and he says that he had built a strip planked boat that was a 10-foot dinghy years ago and he used 10 millimeter strips Pine strips and then he went over the top of that with four millimeter um Marine ply Oakham strips so basically he ended up with a hull that was 14 millimeters so that's about a little bit more than a half an inch thick he then fiberglassed the inside and the outside of the boat and then he of course fared it and it turns out that he also had reinforced the seats uh at the AFT and in the middle and he ended up that it was actually quite light and he says here that he thinks it weighs about 35 kilograms 35 kilograms is 77 pounds and it's he goes on to say that he was able to manage to Hoist the tender on the deck all alone so I think that my calculations are pretty close in that the boat should weigh somewhere in the 75 to 85 pound now one of the things is is my hole is thinner it's only 3 8 as opposed to a half an inch and also it's only a nine foot dinghy instead of a ten foot dinghy now there's some other added weight in that I've got probably more bulkheads than he did so all in all I think that the boat for those that are wondering should weigh somewhere in that 75 to 85 pound range so one of the other things that I had several comments about was how I trimmed up the stem here now if you remember in the last episode I had mentioned that had I not trimmed the stem down then when the planks met here it would have been too wide and it would have been two inches so I had several people say they would have just made a new stem at two inches so let's think through that process a little bit so first of all in order for that stem outer stem to fit perfectly on here it would need to be use this as the template to put it on with the Planks on there there's absolutely no way to get any clamps on there to build up the laminated stem the other thing is is I I would have had to have gone and sourced out a bunch of white oak and trimmed all of those down into those little 1 16 inch laminates so the amount of time it took to trim that down to its proper size literally only took about five minutes so as you can see that the other method of just throwing the old the stem that I'm using away and building a new one would have taken a lot more time a lot more material and quite honestly you would not have gotten as good a fit so I've already trimmed off the planks here and I've got the stem here and so we put the stem on here and we'll clamp it first of all you can see that it fits on there nicely and that you can see that once it's anchored to the top here that it fits that Contour of the boat really perfectly the other thing is is that now as I can see where the planks come in here as I bevel off this stem I'm going to get a really nice thin cut water on there so I'm really happy with the way that goes I will probably I will glue that to the boat and I will put bronze screws in here to hold it in place so the first step of getting ready to fare the hole is to remove all of these temporary screws [Music] foreign I also trimmed the planks off back at the transom I put blue tape on the trampson to protect it from the saw and also on the saw blade on the rip side so that it would Glide easier I also found that cutting from the transom out was much more accurate than cutting from the outside in now they have all those temporary screws out and that I have the planks trimmed at the transom I can now get started fairing the hull and the way I do that is with a hand plane I've got a little block plane here and the trick is to get rid of these sort of high spots where the planks aren't quite level and one of the best ways to do that is to plane on a diagonal like so now what that does is it rides across any high spots and gets rid of them where if I were to plane with the planks this way I would tend to maybe get more of a wavy Motion in there so that's the trick with the plane I'm going to go over the whole Hall with doing it on a diagonal back and forth foreign [Music] thank you all right well it's all fairing out very nicely after I finish all of the planing The Next Step then is to get some fairing compound and fill in all of these screw holes and the cracks and any little divots that may be in there but we're not of time in this episode so we'll have to take care of that in the next episode so thanks for watching and I'll see you the next time on the art of book building

Channel: The Art of Boat Building

Views: 139,125

Keywords: Art of Boat Building, wooden boat building, shipwright skills, Boat Design, building a sail boat, how to build a boat, Haven 12 1/2, Bob Emser boat builder, diy, how to, wood working, boat build, handmade boat, sailing, boat, build your own boat, boat builder, homemade boat, yacht, sailboat, wood, Victoria, do it yourself, Arabella, make it beautiful, woodworking tips, epoxy, strip plank dinghy, shutter plank, the art of boat building, cedar strip planking, what is a whiskey plank

Id: 7M2mnwi_Sks

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023