Keel and Plank Fairing

October 22,2014 Hours spent building to date: 250

Fairing is very boring, since you work and work, but not much on the boat seems to change. But it has to be done, like doing the dishes or cleaning the litter box.

The first job was to turn the keel from flat into a ‘V”, since that’s the only way the planking will lie flat on a V-bottom boat. Two days of planing, moving the ladder and countless up and downs and it looks pretty good. A great big house builders power plane is just too heavy for this kind of work, so several years ago I bought the lightest plane I could find, a DeWalt 26676. It doesn’t work really fast, but it doesn’t totally wear me out either.

Then with the flat part of the boat all ready, I could start on fairing the frames for planking. Thought about adding the fore-and-aft stringers first, but if there’s a big error, they would have to be faired out, too. All the aft planking looked pretty good to begin with, but there was once place where the “practice” plank rocked up and down, so the frame had to be knocked down some to match those on either side. One required a 5/16 shim to bring it even with its sisters. And there’s one spot where I can’t figure out what the hell is going on: the plank lies fair on two frames, then shoots off into the air a half inch before heading down again toward the bow just fine on the next frame. I can force it to fit, but it doesn’t seem right. I am going to practice-plank BOTH sides of the boat tomorrow in the same place, then run back and forth a half-dozen times to see if this happens and on both sides — and is probably right — or an aberration that will take a half-day of fiddling to fix.

I spend way too much time and energy worrying about silly stuff like this. I should just leave the shop and figure it out the next day. But after a lifetime of the normal school-work-wife-money-kid-health worries, I am luckily at a point where I am extremely low on normal concerns. So I guess twisted planks have to fill up the worry-well.