I'm building a boat to a design by Paul Fisher of Selway Fisher Design in the UK. The design is called "Able" and her vital statistics are: overall length 4.88m (16ft), beam 2m (6ft 6in) and design weight is 360kg (790lbs). You can read more about this design at http://www.selway-fisher.com/OtherDB.htm#KANE.

I intend to procede more slowly with this boat than I did with either of my other boat building projects (see links below on the right). This is, after all, a hobby and there are other things to do. So, updates to this blog might happen once every week or two. Come back and see.

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Wednesday 10 July 2013

The Inwales

I've been fitting the inwales (the inside part of the structure along the boats gunwale). Not difficult but they each involve a 5.1 metre (16' 9") long glue joint. This needed all of my smaller screw clamps and so I had to do the two on separate days. Here is the port side inwale with all its clamps in place.


Gluing joints like this is a messy business. Both sides of the joint have to be painted with unthickened epoxy glue and then left to sit for a while, this allows the glue to penetrate into the timber. One side of the joint is then coated with thickened epoxy and the two pieces are then brought together and clamped until the glue sets. The long thin inwale tried to flop about spreading glue on everything it touches. Hence the masking tape and newspaper - it is easier to do the masking than it is to clean off dried epoxy!


Here's a short video of the inwale being clamped in place. The clamping took about 15 minutes but the camera only caught the first half of the job - I didn't want to touch the camera with my sticky hands!
 

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