Building the Squirt

Fairing Now I am in the process of fairing the boat. It seems to be quite a long and slow process. Fairing is when you shape and trim frame members to form a bevel that will allow the side planking to have a flat surface to mate to across the entire boat. Having no clue where to begin I attempted to use the Rabl method as mentioned in the Glen L Boatbuilding with Plywood book. Even then it was difficult to acquire the right angles in the bevel. I decided to jump right in having no idea if what I'm doing is right!  Fairing demonstration from Boatbuilding with Plywood by Glen L. Starting on one side hoping that when I get to the other side I'll have a better idea of what I'm doing. This is where I am at now. I'll try to keep this updated more frequent as I move further along. Which could be a while.

Installing the Chines I decided to use one solid piece for my chines instead of laminating two pieces together to make the chines. I soaked them for two days in PVC pipe and then started bending from the stem working my way to the transom. They were much harder to bend then the sheer laminations and much more tension requiring lots of clamping force. The chines didn't fit quite as well as I would have liked in the pre-cut notches based on the boat plans. I ended up adjusting them a bit to fit the chines however the back side of frame#2 and the chine had quite a gap because the plans didn't take into account the angle that the chine would hit that frame. The gap on the aft side I ended up filling with thickened epoxy. I used the wood dust I had from sanding to thicken the epoxy.  Once the chine was bent into place I needed to add a twist to the chine so I would have adequate surface area to fair for the plywood to attach to the chine and sheer. At first I tried ...

It's been a while since my last update. Very difficult to keep up with the blog when I'd much rather spend time building. I've gotten quite a bit more done since the last update so I probably won't go into much detail on every process. Aligning the Frames Aligning the frames and leveling in all directions was a time consuming process. If your frames are out of alignment then you run the risk of having your boat glide across the water in a crooked line not to mention likely problems later on in the build as well. I started by centering frame #2 and the transom and aligning frame#1 (center frame) to those. I initially tried to use a self-leveling laser level and that did not work like I had hoped so I gave up on the laser and went with a string, taking a thousand measurements in the process to make sure everything was equal. Then I made sure the keel was straight and level. Since the transom and frame are at an angle the keel does not sit flat in the cut out. Instead...