Bulkhead 13; Jig Special Report

August 30. 2014 Hours spent building to date: 76

The big bulkhead at station 13 is done. This separates the main cabin from the head and sleeping area. It is 3/4-inch plywood and demonstrates why I will never build a boat bigger than this — it is the absolute most I can carry without serious bodily harm.

Feels good to get this one done. Even big plywood boats are a lot like the skiffs I’ve been building — sides wrapped around a substantial central frame. In this case there are two — stations 13 and 21.

I also needed some light work after the stress of the boatbuilding workshop, so I built jigs for the 60+ slots you have to cut into the frames and bulkheads for the stringers — big long pieces of wood that tie the boat together fore and aft and provide 76platforms for the planking. Measure, drilling for a jigsaw and cutting over and over again would be time-consuming and boring. So I made a marking jig and a drilling jig that speeds things right along. I also have the same type of tool for the sheer strake and carlins (pieces at the top that accept the deck beams).

The stringer slots are made stronger and wider for the planking glue-up through the use of doublers — plywood half-moons that have their own slots. Again, cutting 60 of them would take forever, so I built a drilling jig to put a hole right in the center of 6 X 6 squares, a cutting jig to hold the squares exactly three inches from the bandsaw blade to cut the circles, and a sled for the table saw to cut them in half. It still took about a day to manufacture all this, but I feel compared to any boat I’ve ever built that Mark’s design and technique allow me to move a lot faster. An extremely positive review of the Olga 28 by Bob Stephens in the September WoodenBoat magazine said exactly that.