Stern Shot

Here is a shot of the stern with the stem still run wild. We will trim the stems, both the chine log and the sheer clamp sides at the next stage.
Up at the bow I had some trouble getting the last hull panel to lay completely flat with on the stem. The seal was good, so I just added a little extra glue to make it flush. With a coat of paint it should look great.
I did have a couple of places where the long screws go through the chine log, the hull panel and into the stem where the chine log started to split. I just backed the screw out a quarter of a turn and made sure all of the other screws were tight and the issue seems to have resolved. If you look carefully at this picture you can see one of those splits.

Is that a boat in your garage or are you just happy to see me???

There it is. A boat. That we (mostly) built. In our garage. How cool is that??

What the Hull?????

Here is my photo-shy wife cleaning up my exuberant gluing.
We used an NRS compressions strap (I wrote a bit about their utility on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools Blog) to bring the two halves of the hull together. This allowed for less yogic contortions.

Stems are on, bringing the hull together

The stems for the bow and stern have been attached and the seats are all on the other half of the hull.
Now it is time to start bringing the two halves together. This collection of glue, wood and nails might actually start to look like a boat sometime soon.

Seat attached to the hull

Pretty self-explanatory. Here is the first seat screwed and glued to the hull. I used a 1/8 inch bit for the pilot holes and a 9/32" bit for the counter sinking.

That's raspy!

Prior to this project I have never owned a woodworkers rasp. Wow, my life was incomplete! What a tool! There are two sides, one for removing more material, the other for less. For trimming the seat pillars there couldn't be a better tool.

Tip: Get a Shinto rasp! You will thank yourself. (Mine came right from CLC with the boat order and it is worth every penny.)

Give yourself a hand!

Here you can see I nailed a piece of 1x2 into my work bench and then used that to stabilize the seat as I worked on it. This made assembling the seats much easier. If you look carefully you can see where the pillar (for lack of a better word) is a little longer than the seat. This is where you rasp/plane comes into play. The angle of the seat is the angle you trim the pillar down to to match the contour of the hull.
Tip: Give yourself a hand and nail a helper into your workbench during seat construction.

We're Baaaaack!

After a couple of weeks off due to vacation and travelling for work we were back at it this weekend.
We built the seats, installed them first on one side and then the other, added the stems to both the bow and stern and screwed it all together.
Here is Larkin putting in some nails on one of the seats.