The Mock-up

Ah yes, a beautiful Saturday in Maine. December without snow and temperatures above freezing? Sounds like sailing weather to me.

After some pretty extensive research online I had some descriptions of the boat dimensions and a few photos to go by. Alarmingly no plans or stations are available that I know of. So looks like this drawing from an old issue of Wooden Boat magazine will be my spiritual boat building guide.



I figured I could use what was left of the original boat as a template and create a full size mock-up from $13 sheets of luan and measure that to create my own stationing to loft the new frame. This would also give me a taste of stitch and glue boat building if I ever decide to go that route for another project.

So I spent the morning scraping frost off plywood, pulling nails, backing out scews, and trying to trace non-existant plywood edges.


































Which I then cut out:

My lines weren't the smoothest so this little fella was a huge help. It's a Stanley 9 1/2 on loan from my father that is probably as old or older than myself. I'd like to think if tools had emotions this one is happy to chew wood again.

Next began the stitching. Using some galvanized tie wire, I predrilled holes along the keel and tied the two hull bottoms together while they were folded and booked match. Opening them up it pulled itself in a curved shape.

Holy cow this actually looks like a boat

Then came the sides. I figured it would be easiest to start at the bow, and use the rest of the plywood to lever the hardest curves into shape.

Okay I would call this a boat

 In surprisingly quick fashion the hull came together. I attached the deck and cut a thwart to stretch it out to the proper beam size. And decided to have some fun.

 
 I started clamping on any and all of the original pieces from the pile and got a real sense of what this will look like. I can't wait to wake up and see this puppy bobbing on it's mooring at the lake each morning.

Stay tuned for me detailing how I used this model to measure for the frames.
  
As an aside, I plan to track man-hours and cash-dollars this project takes with each post. Depressingly I'm sure this will be double my estimate of $400, and close to the $800 an abused but usable sunfish/laser cost on Craigslist. But this is my boat and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Time Invested: 10 Hours
Cash Invested:  $39.00