Assembling the hull panels (1)

On friday evening we worked 1.5 hours to glue the scarf joint for the thicker planks and to fill the voids in the other scarf joints. The things improved but we're still quite far from perfection when it comes to scarfing. Here's a view:

Today we worked 5.5 hours as we started to assemble the hull panels. First thing was cutting the stock for the butt blocks: 20 cm wide strips of 19 mm thick plywood. While cutting, I started to see more and more sparks generated in the motor of the circular saw: I suspect that this is not a good sign...

Anyway, here's a view of the butt block material:

We decided to assemble first the ama panels two at a time using the correspondent ones from each hull which are mirror images of each other.

The panels were aligned and screwed on the table, followed by the precut stringers. Bending those in place proved easier than expected

Then we fitted the plywood butt blocks between the stringers. This is not difficult but requires quite a bit of adjustments. The butt blocks are beefy indeed, but this is because they are placed where akas are connected with the hulls, i.e. high stress areas.

Then we started to cut and fit the vertical stringers. At the beginning this is slow, but after some cuts one becomes more efficient

We're almost ready to glue now! The impression is that this boat is built like a tank: it won't be light but will certainly be extremely strong and take a lot of abuse.

Total work time to date: 45 hours