The Planking Process: From the Sheer Down

So there she is, set up, timbered out, rabbet faired, ready for planking. This is the biggest single job, and probably the most difficult for the beginner-not because there's anything very complicated about it, but because much of it depends on judgment, eye, and the unconscious skill of hand that you gradually acquire with­out knowing it. The old pro loves to fit planks because he can do it without thinking, and it's his great talent, with a sort of timeless rhythm to it, which clothes and defines a thing of beauty.  What we're talking about here is, of course, real planking in the ancient, classical manner: fair-seamed, tapered, fitted and through-fasten­ed to the timbers, smoothed fair, and caulked, Learn this, and you are welcome to try edge­nailed strips, battened seams, cold-molded lam­inates, or chicken-wire-and-fiberglass. (I hope you will sometime try a lapstrake job, because that is beautiful indeed.) But for now let's get on with the problems of smooth planking, which keeps the water out, and the people in, better than anything else I know of, and delineates (at least for you, the builder) the most beautiful shape that man has managed to create.  So, first, you need to know what shape the individual planks will be, before you worry about how to mark, cut, bevel, hang, and fasten them off. This boat we are dealing with is in some ways the most difficult and complicated shape one is likely to encounter, with wineglass sections throughout, great area below the tuck, extreme variations in girth, long counter, and plank ends mitered to the cylindrical-section transom, but that is all to the good, I'm sure that if I can explain it, you can understand it, and you may as well know the worst at the begin­ning, It's like swinging two bats when you come up to the plate,  Lining out the sheer planking Well then. If you will allow yourself to view the hull of our 39-foot sloop in two distinct parts, separated for our purposes approximately along diagonal D2 in Figure 9-1 (and if we're lucky, also along what has been referred to else­where as the tuck ribband), you will dimly dis­cern that I have distinct approaches in mind for these areas. The areas, one above and the other below this ribband, are for our purposes com­pletely independent of each other. Kindly ignore the lower one, and bear with me as I attempt to line out the planks that will clothe the area between this special ribband and the sheer.  The simplest way to do this (and entirely satisfactory, if you have skill and time enough) is to line out with a batten, by eye, the lower edge of the proposed sheerstrake, cut a plank to that shape, fasten it in place, and repeat the whole process over and over till you get there­in this case, to the flat of the bilge, where I hope you're planning to put in the shutter. This method is slow, laborious, and lends to irregu­larities, but it works. I prefer a somewhat more precise system, which is based on the following assumptions: Ideally, all seams are to be fair curves from bow to stern; all planks are to taper exactly the same amounts from the widest point in the middle to their narrowest points forward and aft. Thus, if we have 17 planks, all exactly the same width on station number 5, we should have 17 planks exactly the same width at station number 3, and at station number 7, and anywhere else in the length of the boat.