Final planking, no photos from whiskey plank nor whiskey...

I decided to follow the original plan and went for chine stringers. As this is the 16'' version, I thought it adds stability. Also I found it easier to match the planks with the bottom: The chine stringers actually cover potential lacks of accuracy where the planks meet the bottom as the chine overlaps both the bottom as well as the planks.

The bottom before cutting it out - made from 13 mm American White Ash. Nice scarfing exercise, as the lumber was 3 meters only.

A little work with the handplane. What is not shown on the photo are the ash blocks for the mast step. Solid ash pieces added between mold 1 and 2. I show some photo below from the inside to illustrate the principle. Adding those blocks before planking ensures I think a very strong and "gapless" bond between mast step, planking, stringers and bottom.

Here is a pic from a later stage from the other side. I think it is a good idea to build in those "Ash wedges" at this stage. That way, they are implemented into the hull structure in an optimal way.

Finally closing it all up...

I decided to do a more thorough photo-documentation few weeks after the initial steps - therefore, there is no footage from inserting the Whiskey plank unfortunately (neither from the celebration :-)

save time and effort – learn from the canoe-guy

A guy near Stuttgart, Stefan Krauß, who specializes in strip planked canoes, has developed (and happily shares on his website) a great technique to speed up the planking process with bead-and-cove planks and increase accuracy of the planks. I will not provide too many details on the technique here, just check yourself on the website, the fotos are quite self-explaining. 

Plywood molds “squeeze” the planks in exactly the right position. I am happy to help if anyone needs further information on this. I found it extremely convenient, as there is almost zero fiddling around with funny clamping, no holes from nails / screws etc.

One plank for each side was sacrificed to make sure pressure from the strips is distributed equally - I taped the plank so it would not take any glue

melonseed skiff, melonseed

Getting started...

Too much time in cold, wet winters can lead to quite funny decisions in life.

For me it was the decision to build a boat.

I owe this (at least the initial spark) to Barry Long, who I have never met but got totally drawn into his masterpiece blog - thank you Barry for the great inspirations and entertainment!

After reading the blog (and some more) the melonseed virus - I am sure there is such thing - got me: I just had to build one of those great looking American East-Coast gunning skiffs that I had never even heard about before.

www.traditionalsmallcraft.com/Melonseed.html

"Incubation time" was about 2 years - finally I ordered Marc Barto's Plan for the 16'' version from www.woodenboat.com and started building in late May 2014:

Molds on the strongback - on heavy duty wheels for moving around in the narrow workshop. For the lofting I took it the easy way, photocopied the 1:1 layouts of the molds from the plan and just glued them to the fibre boards and cut them out with jig- and bandsaw

I learned a lot from various building blogs out there, so the purpose of the upcoming postings is to as well share some of  the ideas and lessons learned with other enthusiasts out there. The beginning of the blog is rather retrospect as I just started with the blog on August 18th, however have been building since May as said.

I wish everyone who comes across these pages happy reading!