Stitching on the planks

Mon, Sep 26, 2022

The next step in building the Candlefish 16 is to get the strongback built, carefully position the bulkheads, and stitch the planks on. At this point, she starts looking like a boat.

The strongback is a frame that will support the boat until we turn it right side up. The cross pieces are carefully positioned to hold the bulkheads the correct spacing apart.

The transom is 1 inch thick, so it has the strength to hold up the outboard motor and can bear the force of that motor pushing the boat through the water. Because we’re using 1/2 inch plywood, we laminate two pieces together to get the thickness. The screws help hold them together in places where the force of the clamps doesn’t reach. We’re not too worried about the screw holes, as we’ll fill them in with epoxy when we fill the wire stitching holes later on.

The two halves of the bottom of the boat get stitched together along the keel line with electric fence wire. This will hold the shape of the boat until we get some epoxy into the seams to glue it together.

It’s critical the the bulkheads be lined up exactly, or the boat will come out warped. Before we cut them out, we drew the center line of the boat and the waterline, the level that the designer expects the boat will float at. We use a two plane laser level to line those up exactly as we mount the bulkheads to the strongback.

Once the bulkheads are in place, it’s time to start stitching on the planks. At this stage we’re just pulling the plywood into shape and clamping it there. That way once we get epoxy on the seams, it will be locked into this shape. Notice how the planks are intentionally cut a bit long so they overhang the transom; it’s easy enough to trim them up after everything is glued, but harder to deal with coming up a bit short.

The next step will be to mix up some epoxy. We’ll write that up shortly.