A Smooth and Fair Hull

This will be a short chapter for me, and a long two weeks for you. You are going to plank the transom, bung the fastenings, smooth the hull, caulk, smooth some more, and mark the water­line; and you're going to do these things before you take the molds out, or you'll be sorry. I always reverse the procedure, and have all these things to do with shores and staging in the way. But I assume that you have a flawless character, and neither postpone the tedious nor reach greedily for the next payment before it is due. So keep your itching hands off those molds, and do what I tell you.  First, start someone bunging. This job may appear to be on a sub-kindergarten level, since it involves only round pegs and round holes, but there's more to it than meets the eye (see Figure 11-1 ). A small dab of integrity goes into each one of the 5,000 counterbores, along with the glue and the bung. You ream the glue into the hole with a tiny brush, start the bung with the grain in line, drive it true to the bottom of the hole, and never bruise it with an impatient hammer. Clip the excess off with a very sharp chisel, using the heel of your hand as a mallet. Make the first cut 1/s inch out, to see how the. grain slopes; approach it from the opposite side, if necessary, for the final cut. Don't bung the sheerstrake.  Plank the transom next. You'll meet with powerful arguments in favor of three layers of 3/s-inch plywood, glued together, or lamina­tions of thin mahogany, bent in cold and set in glue. I still prefer to do the job in one thickness, with stock that has been steam-bent and dried on a form, and fitted, plank by plank, from the bottom up. I can get a better fit, in far less time, and have no worries about hidden gaps where rot could start. The individual planks can be held in place with a reasonable number of large, durable fastenings, instead of a multi­tude of small ones. The miter seam can be flooded with poison and caulked snug. The planks can be planed and sanded to shape with no fear of working through the outer layer. Five small problems hold less terror than two very large ones.  Whatever you use, however, the method of fitting is the same. You need to know the exact shape of that line where the inner face of the planking intersects the outside edge of the tran­som frame-the inner corner of the miter joint, that is (see Figure 11-2). You get this shape by fitting a skeleton pattern to the line-using a thin piece each side, and joining the two with a third, bent around the 'thwartships curve and tacked to the two with small brads. This pat­tern will later be placed on the inside, concave face of the pre-bent stock (see Figure 11-3), and you must therefore drive those brads flush so that the pattern can back into place on the piece to be marked. From the line thus obtained you cut outward, at the proper angle, and proceed to correct it until it fits. You have the consola­tion of knowing that you can lengthen it out, so long as you are still below the turn of the bilge, by dressing off the lower edge of the plank. Above the turn, in the region of the tumblehome, you have to be right the first time. Finish off at the top with a plank wide enough to crown to the underside of the deck at the center. Fasten each plank temporarily, before fitting the next;