Keel laying!!!!!

Started my Christmas shopping, so that took some time from the build. Complete chaos at all the shopping centres today, I almost gave up and went home.

Trimmed the uprights to the right breadth, beveled the tops and screwed the bottom plank to the strongbox. Finally keel laid! (I did not get any good pictures of this unfortunately)

The next step is to fit the chine stringer to the bottom plank, I decided to rip the 20x40 stringer into two so that it would bend more easily. So again (as I do not have a table saw) I had to set up a jig. As a base I used a 150x20 plank, on along the edge of this I secured a 20x30 piece of wood to guide the saw. I put a 20x20 next to the saw guide to get the correct distance to the blade (distance from the blade to the edge of the base plate is 40mm), then the stringer I wanted to rip and next to this another stringer as support for the saw. As usual maybe a picture tell more....

From left to right. 150x20 base plank (below the rest), support stringer, stringer that is getting ripped, 20x20 spacer piece and the 20x30 that guide the saw.

However since my "jig" pieces are much shorter than the stringers I had to move the jig a few times per stringer (I really need a table saw). When the first stinger was ripped I swapped places of the two stringer and did it again.

Both stringers have been ripped

Unfortunately I set the saw depth a little to shallow so I had to run a hand saw along the groove to separate the pieces.

All left to do before fitting the stringers is to clean them up a little with a smoothing plane.

Planing stringers

Then it is time to glue the stringer in place, first I did a dry fit and even though I had reduced the cross section I had to fight a little to get it in place.

Dry fitting the stringer, you can also see that the "Keel laying" celebrations have started

Since the dry fit went quite fine I decided to do the glueing without screws, only clamps (you might remember that I have a problem with screwing the bottom stringer since my strong box is in the way). What I forgot was that the epoxy is like a lubricant so it was a little fiddly to get it to stay in place.

First stringer glued in place

Tomorrow I will glue the second stringer and cut the hole for the centre board (yikes!)

To celebrate the keel laying I started up the fireplace with wood shavings and leftovers from the garage.

Time today: 3h (Total time: 50.5) [I have now passed 1/8th of my planned building time]