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I had a visit from one of my crew teams today (I have two teams. The other team is younger) to check on progress. The good news is that I have had a good test of the strength of box frame joints and it stood up well. The bad news is that my crew decided… Continue reading The Crew Visits

In boat building terminology “fair” is a term used to denote the evenness or regularity of a curve or line. The egg box frame – longitudinals, bulkheads, the transom and the stem all need to be “faired” so that the strip planks can be laid to give a nice even, regular surface. I use one… Continue reading Fairing the egg box frame

With the deck shelves in place, it is time to cover them, the end of the keel and the rest of the transom with a layer of Iroko. I glued the lower plank in place first so that I had could clamp all the facing planks together without having to worry about them slipping out… Continue reading Facing the Transom

Doing anything for a second time usually takes less time and that was the case for the second deck shelf.

For the Golant Gaffer design (I don’t know if this is more general), the deck shelves wrap around the bulkheads at the top of the hull and provide the base for hull planking and the deck, and so are an important structural piece. I made the amateur’s mistake of ordering the specified softwood from my… Continue reading Deck Shelves

The next job is to add another layer of the keel. The keel will have to be shaped to follow the line of the bulkheads and Roger Dongray recommends planing off some of the wood fixing the plan in place. Below is my device for marking how much wood will need removing. Resin applied and… Continue reading Keel Second Layer

On the Golant Gaffer, the keel starts with 2 long (5.1m) planks of Iroko, the first of which is to be screwed and glued to the bottom edges of the floors – which, because I am building upside down, are at the top. But I am getting ahead of myself. As is normal, the timber… Continue reading Starting the Keel

I thought it would be interesting to show all the steps in the process of making this piece all the way from rough cut planks. I bought my Iroko hardwood as sawn planks, i.e. straight off the saw table, fairly rough. You can buy timber cut and planed to finished size, but that, of course,… Continue reading Building the Stem

You need a solid base to bolt the engine to. On the Golant Gaffer this base, the engine beds, is made by sandwiching a section of the longitudinals with a chunk of Iroko on the outside… And plywood on the inside. The engine mounts will be bolted to the engine beds.

The process of bending the deck shelf around the bulkheads exerts high forces which would distort the boat’s alignment without good bracing. You can see in the pictures below the struts I have added. It will be interesting to find if this is enough.