July

The sides of the boat are going on next. Again, the plywood is too short, so we have to scarf two pieces together. Here is the beginning of the scarfing procedure. After following the plans (we hadn't done that in a while) to draw out the side panel on both pieces of plywood, we lined them up approximately and clamped them onto the stringers to make sure we'd have enough wood at the bow.

The two pieces of plywood will soon become one!

Once we've determined exactly where the scarf will be, we turn one board over and line up the top edge with the line drawn on the bottom piece. There is a certain ratio for the width of the plywood that determines how far back the scarf has to start. The sides are made out of 6 mm ply and I think we had to go back 48 mm, so that would be 8 mm for every 1 mm of ply.
Then we screw down the boards onto the sawhorse so they can't move and start sanding. On the bottom piece, we used the planer since it was 9 mm ply, but the 6 mm went really fast with just the belt sander. You make sure each layer of ply is sanding down evenly by checking that the strips of wood you see are about parallel and even. The trick is to not sand above the pencil mark on the top piece and to get the pointed edges down to a feather edge (the very last ply) without sanding away too much. I'm pretty bad at using the belt sander, so Daddy worked on this one.

Once it's all sanded nice and evenly, the top board gets flipped back over and should fit perfectly onto the bottom board - the angles match up and it is like you have one piece of wood. Then we glue the two together, nail them in place (also to the sawhorse), clamp them in place, and let the glue dry. And then you've got one long piece of plywood!

After scarfing one side, the parents are on vacation, so building is on hiatus. I'll probably work on filling some countersunk screw holes on the bottom while Daddy's gone, but the sides will actually go on when they're back from vacation.