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.