Week 23 before launch - Inner stems, hog & 1st garboard

29.06.-05.07.15

Inner Stems, hog & producing the first garboard plank

Adapting the hog to the stems

The backbone consists of  the two inner stems and the hog. The hog is the base where the garboards (the first and lowest planks) will be glued onto. 

To get a smooth curve from the hog to the stems to be connected I drew on the hog the extended line of the stems and  carved a lot of small grooves to make it easier to chisel it down.

The result - stem & fitted hog

Sometimes you have to do something which does not really need to be done. For example putting the outer stem onto the inner stem - just to see how it will look. In the gap between the outer stem and innerstem/hog the keel will later be fitted.

aft stems

bow stems

Leveling the hog to the moulds

The next step was to bevel the hog over the whole length to the level of the moulds.

The line from the hog to moulds has to be smooth so the garboard can adapt perfectly to them. This process has to be done very carefully because the sailing performance of a boat depends on a large percentage on the lining of these planks.

After leveling the hog to the moulds we had to do the same with the stems. The planks have to fit to the stems at a certain angle, which changes constantly over the whole length of the stem.

As a preparation therefore, we did "revolved sections" of the stems during the lofting. That means we constructed the angle of the incoming planks to the stems. That enabled us to plane the now required bevel on the stems.







On Thursday we started to line up the planks. (that means we divided the "boat hull" into 14 parts (7 each side) to find the best shape for the planks. To get nice and fair lines, we used long wooden battens. We came to a solution, which was a compromise between our results and the proposal of the designer Iain Ougthred.  This process of trial & error took a whole day.

By Friday evening I was behind my projectplan, the garboard pieces were cut, but far from being fitted as projected ;-) - so a couple of extra hours at the weekend were needed.

Friday evening  Eva assisted me in glueing the first garboard plank. Saturday I cleaned it and Sunday I started to fit it to the backbone.