Cutting the Strips.

Cutting big boards into small strips has taken me a few days and caused a lot of head scratching but fortunately only one reason for using the moaning chair.

I started by putting a 185 mm diameter thin balde in the table saw and making a zero clearance insert.

I found that the blade would only cut about 45 mm thick material and I had a 50 mm thick board so had to change back to the big blade with its 3 mm kerf. Then I cut the 200 x 50 mm board into 8 pieces.

Eventually I realised that I should have put the board through the thickness to get one clean face which would have given the strips a clean face against the fence when I got to cutting the strips. I set these strips aside and went on to the wider boards. At 320 mm wide these would not go through my 300 mm wide thicknesser so I used the big blade to cut them each into three pieces about 106 x 30 mm. Here they are.

These are 30 mm thick and I wanted to cut them vertically into 16 x4.8 mm strips. First step was to clean up one face on the thicknesser so I resaw them into thinner boards on the bandsaw leaving me with about 8 mm thick offcuts which may have some future use.

I put a new 20 mm wide blade in the bandsaw but didn't adjust the blade guides accurately enough. The test cut in some scrap pine looked OK so I tried to cut the first wide cedar board. About a third of the way along the blade wandered off to the wrong side. I readjusted the blades very carefully and tried again. This time it cut straight but I would only be able to get short strips out of this board.

I cut the rest of the boards and then ran them through the thicknesser down to 16 mm. Here they are plus some of what seems like a huge amount of shavings!

Back to the table daw with the small thin kerf blade to cut some strips. What I found next was that it is important to start the whole process with a board that has straight and parallel edges. My 320 mm wide board was rough sawn with edges that were not quite straight and therefore the width varied. I had cut it into three and so had three boards that were quite straight on the rough side - the middle board was almost OK.

The problem I encountered was that I couldn't use a finger board to push the stock against the fence because the stock would jom on the wider parts. I had to cut the strips with a finger board holding them down and hand pressure to keep them against the fence.

Here are photos of the saw setup with both finger boards in place but it didn't work out wee as I said above.

I use the roller infeed table because I have it and need it for the heavier stock. I find the heavy stock will not slide well over fixed supports such as saw horses because I'm not physically strong enough and I don't have a power feeder. The down side of the roller infeed is that no matter how carefully I set it up it tends to steer heavier boards to one side or the other. This makes it harder to keep them flat against the fence. On the outfeed side I have a couple of wide tables set up with ramps to lift the drooping stock up onto them. The ramps are covered in waxed paper (a tip from Nick Schade) which worked quite well.

 This worked OK but was hard work and I was ready for a beer when they were all done. Each of the 6 boards gave me 15 strips Which I carefully kept in the order that they came off the board. I put them away temporarily in bundles tied up with shrink wrap tape.

Next was to go back the the lighter coloured cedar. I ran each of the sawn strips through the thicknesse to bring them down to 16 mm and also to clean up one narrow edge - I should have done this while the original board was still intact. Saw these was easier because I could use the finger board to keep the stock against the fence and it was just a matter of feeding them through the was. Again I kept them in order and bundled them together with shrink wrap.

When they were all cut I laid them out in the order I had cut them. This is what they looked like.Each of the 8 pieces gave me 7 strips, 56 in total. In the photo every 7th strip is darker  because it was closest to the surface of the slightly weathered board. This discolouration sands away so wont be visible in the boat. Apart from that there is no discernible pattern so the strips can be used in any order.

I expected the strips from the wider darker coloured board to show a more obvious pattern - the original was flat sawn and had some very distinct grain on the wide surface. The vertical strips did have some variation but after hours of trying slip matching and book matching I could bring out any patterns that extended further than a couple of strips so I gave up and took those that were most evenly matched in colour.


In the photos below are the strips laid out as they will go on the boat. All flat and then in some racks to keep them in the order that they will be used and in a smaller space.

The strips on the left are for the deck (above the waterline). on the right are the strips for the hull (below the waterline). The first strips to go on the boat are from the part line (where the hull and deck are separated to get them off the building frame) down to the waterline. The lighter coloured strips form the rest of the hull below the waterline.

Out off the 146 (90 dark + 56 light) strips I cut about 94 (52 +42) will go into the boat. This leaves me with a bit more than half the strips needed to build another boat.

Several lessons learned about preparation of rough sawn stock and, before I start on another strip sawing epic, I might buy a power feeder for the tablesaw!

But I now ready to go on - next job to cut and fit the inner stem and stern pieces.

First Steps, Frames, Strongback and Workbench.

With the plans in hand there was a flurry of activity which involved a lot of driving around Brisbane. First stop was to get the plans copied followed by an aluminium supplier to buy a 12'6" (3810mm) long piece of 100x50mm box section for the strongback.  I also called at the timber merchant to see what they had in the way of cedar for the strips. Seemed to be a lot of other stops for miscellaneous stuff, more PVA glue, lots of tape, small squeezy bottles to decant the glue into, new blades for bandsaw, table saw and thicknesser, the list seemed endless.

Back at home I cut out the frame shapes from the copies of the plans and glued them to some 12mm ply left over from a previous project. Then spent a couple of hours standing at the bandsaw cutting them out, all 16 of them plus the supports for the stem and stern. Here they are .

Each of these frames needs a 100x50mm hole to be accurately cut in it to fit the aluminium strongback which is resting on the saw horses behind the frames. The patterns are imperial so the hole is 4"x2". I considered various approaches to doing this and in the end drew the two rectangles with the centrelines on my computer and then printed out 15 copies on some thin paper that I could see through. I cut these up and carefully taped them in place on each pattern. Then I roughly cut the holes out with a jigsaw. I made an accurate template from scrap ply with a 100x50mm hole in it to be a nice sliding fit on the strongback. This template was placed over each frame, fixed in place with 4 brads and the hole in the frame cleaned out with the router using a straight bit with a guide bearing. This left holes with round corners but a file soon fixed that. Here are the frames on the strongback. Looking at the bow.

And at the stern.

Here's the bow frame inserted into the end of the strongback with packing pieces either side of it to keep it centered. Screws through the aluminium fix the bow and stern frames firmly in place. The imperial plans bite again here - the frames 1/2" think should be 9.5" apart (10" from reference face to reference face).  I made up some U shaped channel out of 90x19mm pine and cut off 15 pieces 242mm long. One of these is standing on the strongback.

The spacers keep the frames the right distance apart and at right angles to the centreline. In the middle of the boat one of the spacers is modified to accept two wedges. These two wedges hold the frames firmly in place.

With the strongback resting on the saw horses the whole boat would have been too low for me to work on comfortably so I built a raised bench to support the boat at a more convenient height. A couple of 70x35mm lengths of pine a more scrap 12mm ply gave me this. It looks a bit wobbly but the table is bolted to the sawhorses and is quite firm.

Here's the boat sitting on the work bench. I will probably add a shelf along either side of the boat to keep tools,  glue etc close to hand.

Just visible on the floor behind the sawhorses is the timber for the strips. I brought the timber home on one of my boat trailers. The light coloured piece is 200x50mm Western Red Cedar  and the darker pieces are 320x30mm Surian Cedar. Light colour below the water line and dark above is the plan.

The Surian Cedar is flat or back sawn and it appears from the grain pattern that these two pieces were adjacent in the log.

Next step is to start cutting these three pieces of timber into lots of strips.

The Plans Arrived.

On  10/3/2020 the package from Nick Schade at Guillemot Kayaks  arrived.  Since then I've been working slowly, gathering tools and materials for the boat. In the package were the plans, a Roboplane, and Nick's book.

The Roboplane is a holder for the Veritas Mini Shoulder Plane. In the second photo the plane is  positioned in the Roboplane and held there by two rare earth magnets. This tool is used to plane a bevel on the last  strip fitted on the boat to allow the next strip to fit with no gaps.

Nick's book contains a wealth of information on strip planked boats and includes complete plans for 3 boats.  Another important source of information is the series of 69 videos made by Nick covering the complete built of a microBootlegger Sport.

The last items in the package were a T-shirt and cap. Now I have no excuse to not get on with the job.