SeaNova – between the hammer and the anvil 

I invested in a disc sander today. I knew that sanding all those planks, even after having been planed, was going to be a bear of a job. The disc sander earned it’s crazy price today, making quick work of the rough sanding of the planks into a uniform surface with 80 grit paper. Here’s the result.

You can see that I’ve reglued and reclamped the ends of the plank ending on the sheer to ensure a tight fit. I should have done this on the first pass!

Here’s the view of the side showing the flow of the hull as it flares back towards the ‘barrel-back’ area at the transom.

I think it’s going to work….

more of the same today, as I planked the other side today. I started by trimming the bow to allow the second side to overlap the first. Then I has to rip more planks to ensure that I had enough once I started. I ripped ~30 planks and ran them through Mike’s planner to get everything uniform. Then I started.

I didn’t think things through, so although I thought I started out the second side in the same way as the first, the planks ended up running along different lines on the two sides. I did make sure that the sweep of planks up the bow area had the same appearance, they don’t match. (I certainly won’t allow that to happen on my next boat….it looks fine but I know that things aren’t symmetric!) Pictures to follow….

I planked the port side this afternoon. Given my experience with the transom, I started off running all the planks through my buddy Mike’s planer:

this ensured the planks had uniform thickness, reducing the amount of post application work. Here’s what it looked like part way through the process…

I spent quite a bit of time fretting about the line of the planks in the forward third of the hull. I guess I anticipated the planks to roughly follow the line of the chine – as happened in with Bronkalla’s Riviera. But that’s not the way things went. The lines of the Malahini hull had the planks going from parallel to the chine and then flowing ‘up’ towards the sheer. I tried twisting, bending, etc., but the planks laid flat upon the hull and in a continuous fair line where they ended up. I didn’t take a good picture of this in the end…perhaps tommorow.

But the lines from the sheer to the chine ended up looking pretty nice anyway:

I can’t wait to see what it looks like after trimming tomorrow….