Now that the longitudinal members are done, the frame is pretty much complete. But it’s not finished just yet. The outside edges of each and every piece of framing have to be shaped so that the skeleton of the hull – the frame – is “fair.” That’s boat-speak for “smooth.” This is essential so that when you bend the skin planking over the frames you get nice smooth curves instead of something full of lumps and flat spots. It’s also critical that you have wide contact points so that there’s a place on the frame to glue to. If you only contacted the framing at the very edges, you’d have a very poor bond indeed.
Allow me to introduce you to a tool about which I’m somewhat ambivalent. It’s exceptionally useful for the task, but it’s truly been my misery whip over the past days. I present, the low angle block plane:
We used this, and sanders, draw knives, and other implements of destruction, to shave away huge amounts of the framing that we’d painstakingly assembled. The next photo shows some shavings generated around the bow. That’s the tip of a big iceberg. I think we filled two garbage cans with little ribbons of douglas fir.
I don’t have a final-final image for you, though realistically it’s hard to capture the result of many hours of back breaking work in a picture. It mostly looks the same as it did before. But if you look below you’ll see that the sheer clamp is starting to be tapered to a knife-edge at it’s perimeter. We’ve also shaved a ton of material away from the side stringers to get them fair.
This whole process is a bit nervewracking in that it’s easy to screw up, and hard to know when it’s “done.” Unless you measure constantly you can easily remove more material than you wanted to. This happened to me in a couple of places including at the very tip of the bow and near the break in the starboard sheer. I had to glue some additional material in and then shave it all back down again.
You can always make it a little better, and knowing when to stop is clearly something you get a feel for after your 3rd boat. I am on my first, so I’m nervous. But I think we’re done, which means we’re ready to start planking. Yee haw!
-Ben
