Marking out the planks

Next Job is to mark out the planks for cutting. I wasn't able to reach over the sheet to draw the lines for planks 3, 4 and 5 until I had cut out planks 1 and 2. Used a tiling edge to make the curves and raided the cupboard for some cans. As I said, its always useful to have a good supply of cans in case of global armageddon, killer bird flu or spontaneous boatbuilding.

Scarphing the plywood sheets

The planks for the Stornoway 12 are longer that the length of a sheet of ply and as I hate trying to scarph individual planks, I thought I would just scarph the entire sheets and cut the planks from the extra long sheets. The hard part about scarphing is lining up the planks so that they are straight. If you cut the planks from extra long ply then you don't have this problem. It is actually easier to line up two 8x4 sheets (if you have the space).



Scarphing is along the usual lines starting off with a plane and then moving to a belt sander. You can see from my ply that I am using a 1-4-1 mm ply. It is a mixture of red and white meranti.



Lining up the edges to keep it straight is fairly easy with a straight peice of wood and can even be done by looking down the straight edge. I didn't need to scarph two 8ft sections as none of my planks are longer than 13 foot so I cut off a 5ft section from one sheet and scarphed an 8ft sheet to a 5ft section of the other sheet.


To weight down, simply empty your cupboards of anything heavy but try not to get the epoxy or sanding dust in the dry goods as your partner may object to this on health and safety grounds.


Whoever said it wasn't a good idea to always keep plenty of canned goods in the home !!!