navigator progress

Despite some cold and difficult weather conditions, the Navigator hasn't been totally neglected and a few planks have found their way onto the frame. Putting the planks on the whole boat could probably be done in a couple of days of solid work, but I'll need several weeks of very intermittent work, partly due to other commitments, partly due to weather constraints.

Planing the stringers to the correct angle was a bit of a challenge in the physical sense, in that it involved coiling my gangly frame up into a very short contorted ball and sitting under the hull. I can still do that. But it takes a little while to unwind fully afterwards...

However, I did make the building frame quite high in preparation for that bit of the process, and things get easier as the planks go on, and up. I'm using John's designed plank lengths and joints. This means carefully placed reinforced butt joints instead of scarf joints. I can't see any benefit from using scarfs in this design on the planks, the savings in weight would be negligible on a non-class boat, and the strength gained is considerable. They are all discretely placed so as not to cause visual embarrassment.

To get a nice bottom edge (I hope) I have placed the oversized board up to the frame, held on with spring clamps and then scribed a pencil line along the top of the stringer. I've then drawn the top edge and the outside edges- but these will be cut a little over width and length to allow for adjustment and final fit. The bottom edge is then marked off to add the 20mm overlap, and a batten is used to spring a nice curve to the marked points. This bottom line is then cut, trial fitted, visually assessed, then removed and planed to a fair curve- looking at it from the ends to evaluate the success (or not) of the fairing. When a new plank is joined to this plank, I used a batten to establish the continuation of the curve across the joint before final fairing of the new board.