When we last checked in, Cherokee had her seams all caulked and puttied. Black putty below the waterline, white above.
She looks a little different these days.
Woah! She's been longboarded and primed! Longboarding, in case you don't already know, is the perfect activity for a cold day in the shop. It consists of sanding the hull using long, flexible boards with sandpaper attached to them. It's not particularly hard if you're doing it for five or ten minutes... however doing a whole boat takes some getting used to and it works up a great sweat when you're chilly.
The point of longboarding is to create a smooth, fair hull shape. If you were to sand the hull using, say, a 4" x 4" square electric palm sander, the hull would get nice and smooth, but the sander would ride up and down every little hill & valley in the hull. You'd get a smooth surface, but not a fair surface. The longboard flexes to follow the shape of the hull to a degree, but it selectively hits the high spots and rides above the low spots. The end result is a hull with no dips and ridges, leaving only the gentle, easy sweep as envisioned by the designer. Such a shape not only looks good to the eye, but makes a surface that water can easily slip around.
Each iteration of sanding, painting and puttying moves us one step closer to the final goal of a curving, glass-smooth hull.
Up on deck, Robin and Karl have been working on the little step (or "rabbet") that the covering boards will set down into when they're attached to the deck beams.
The covering boards are the outermost boards on the deck. They form a transition between the canvas covering of the deck and the wood of the hull. They also cover up and protect the end grain of the frames as well as the top edge of the sheer strake. They are often finished bright to add a warm accent to the painted hull and deck.
You can see that the deck beams have all been bolted down to the sheer clamp, and the bolts have been recessed enough so that the rabbet doesn't hit them. You can also see a little hole just inboard of each of these bolts. Those are where the covering board will fasten to the deck beams. There will also be blocking set on top of the sheer clamp and in between each deck beam for additional covering board support.
The rabbet continues on into the solid wood at both the front and back ends of the boat.
And a little closer look at that...
And here are the actual covering boards!
You're looking at them from the forward end. Lotta curve, eh? Here's a close up of the forward end.
Since these are so long, we've had to make them up from multiple boards, using a scarf joint to connect them.
This joint is one that we tend to be very very fussy about. After all, it's one of those places on the boat where you can really see the shipwright's ability to make a nice, tight joint.
Up on deck, the two cockpits have been framed out. Here you're looking forward from just behind the boat steerer's cockpit.
In the last entry you saw the curved carlins being made that went along the sides of the forward cockpit. The blue arrow points to that part, now installed.
The red arrow is pointing at a lighter strip of wood next to the carlin. This is being used to pattern out the coamings that will eventually go up against the carlin.
Here's a little close up of that carlin, showing the dovetail and half-dovetail joints used to lock it into the deck beams.
When you think about it, a boat is a big web of support members tied together with decking and planking. Given that it needs to hold its shape, despite the tremendous forces thrown at it by wind and water, you need to make sure that your web is very stiff and very strong. At the same time, you need to make some holes in this web for the cockpit so that people can actually get in and out of the boat. So, how do you keep the boat stiff when you've just cut out a whole bunch of deck beams?
In some ways, we deal with this problem the same way that house builders deal with doors and window openings in a framed wall. We put in extra large beams on either side of the openings, and we add extra bracing to stiffen things up near the openings. Here the blue arrow is pointing to one such brace, called a knee. Ok, it's technically a "lodging knee" because it's oriented horizontally.
A knee in a boat is any sort of structural member that stiffens up two joined parts by making a diagonal connection between them. We see this all the time in timber framed homes,
on porches
or around the house
So, even though we've got this huge hole in our deck, the thicker deck beams and the bracing helps to keep everything solid.
The coaming for the rear cockpit has been patterned out and is just about ready for fitting now.
This is silver bali that's been steamed and bent around a form. The little cuts at the ends are there to fit it around the cockpit frame and decking. Oh yes, and it's upside down in this photo...
Next up, we'll install the covering boards and get started with the decking.