Thursday, October 9, 2008

And Planking Begins...

Today was the first day of planking the ama with foam. To get to this point, we first needed to lay battens over the form frames to define the shape of the hull. Rather than butt battens together, which I believe creates a hard, unfair spot, I scarfed three lengths of lumber together with a 12:1 scope. I used clear Douglas Fir, 1"x4"x8' (2) and 1"x4"x"10', with the 10' section in the middle and the 8' sections on the end.

I glued the scarfed wood with WEST system epoxy mixed with 403 Micro Fibers and 406 Colloidal Silica. After the glue set (2 days), I sanded the excess off and trimmed each 24' length of lumber into 4, 3/4" battens. All in all, I had 3, 24' lengths of lumber, which produced 12 battens. I only used 10 on the ama and you can see from the pictures below how the battens are oriented.

That was the fun part. I'll get to the thermoforming in the next post. What a grueling job.






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