Author: The Slow Boat Builder

Here, I am finishing off the filling and fairing to provide a smooth finish for the layers of fibreglass. All done! And it seemed a good time to fine sand the transom. When finished, the fibreglass will lap over the edge onto the transom, but the transom will have a clear finish. Below, the transom… Continue reading Preparing for sheathing

With the capping of the skeg and stem in place, the next step was to plane the skeg capping and add an epoxy cove between the keel/deadwood and the hull. The stem capping needed to be plained to match the hull and then nicely rounded off. Which left me with a hull (nearly) ready for… Continue reading Fairing and Preparing

The skeg is made up of layers of marine ply with outer layers of iroko. The next step is to cap over the end with iroko pieces to provide a strong outer surface. Each piece of Iroko is planed to fit and then glued in place. I decided that, rather than attempt a perfect fit… Continue reading Capping the Skeg

As you will see in the photograph below, the stem is made up of a nice solid iroko central core, with the strip planks glued and screwed to either side. The keel curves down from the top (with hull upside down) to join it. In order to provide protection for the soft strip planking, the… Continue reading Progressing the Stem

Now, as you can see below, I have a nice flat surface to add layers of keel The challenge is that I am again dealing with big and very long lumps of hard wood. And if they came of the timber merchant’s saw straight, they certainly aren’t straight after sitting in my shed for a… Continue reading Adding keel layers

Time to fit my deadwood to the hull. The main piece is a big chunk of wood. Aft and forward pieces guide into position. They provide a nice flat surface to take the remaining layers to build up the full keel. As well as being glued with epoxy, there will be a number of keel… Continue reading Fixing the Deadwood

As well as the main deadwood at the stern, I need to add a piece at the forward end to fair the keel into the stem. My steel rule produced a reasonable curve to mark out the template. I marked out and cut Iroko pieces from the template. Below, you can see 2 layers being… Continue reading Making the forward end

The Skeg/Deadwood needs an outer facing of Iroko hardwood, and I need some nice flat and smooth blanks 30mm thick to do this. I bought all my Iroko as (rough) cut planks. You can buy the planks nicely planed and cut to the correct dimensions. Any sensible person would do it that way, but then… Continue reading Back to preparing planks

It has been cold – really cold for Weymouth. So much so that my most important boat building equipment froze overnight!. Ice in my espresso machine and kettle. My little space heater has been working hard, but I can’t do any gluing until the weather changes. If you go back a couple of posts, you… Continue reading Fun with a Router

Literally, I have made a breakthrough and here is the proof. A hole in my hull. I spent a lot of time worrying about this step. How do you get the angle of the drill right when the plan gives you one fixed point outside of the hull and one other fixed point inside the… Continue reading Breakthrough