Next, after dry fitting, the chines and sheers we scribed the frames for in-letting before seating the chines and sheers and gluing and screwing. Pictured below you can also see that we removed frame nine from its station. We thought that forcing the 2×8 keelson over it and hoping it would align with the stem was an extraordinary thing. Instead, we trusted the wood to give a fair curve and thought we would build a new frame to fit all the curves coming together, keelson, chines, and sheers.

We do not have pictures of the scribing process, which is a bit of a shame. It looks a lot like pencil marks on wood when it is done correctly. 😉 Mark Vickers offers a helpful explanation in his video.

We marked all the frames and then removed the chines and sheers, and it was time to start in letting the ends of the frames. We struggled a bit to find an approach that worked for us. We had a dull old backsaw, so I started with that. The cuts were clean but took forever. After trying the belt-sander and the angle grinder, I settled on the grinder. Em, sharpened a chisel and worked patiently with that cleaning up my big, sloppy grinds. He liked the grinder too. We all were also puzzling about how to bring the sheers and chines into the stem.

If you watch Mark’s video, he explains as well about squaring the frames and then working back and forth in a crosshatch pattern when attaching the chines. The point is to evenly tension the frames as the longitudinals are added, hopefully avoiding torking them. The picture on the left above shows how we used blocks to accomplish that. We also used a level to check on the frames being plumb-ish. As our new favorite saying goes, “It isn’t furniture its a working boat.” Nonetheless, we glued and screwed the chines and sheers on and spacing and plumb were good.

Patty found this video, and we decided to try bringing the sheers to the stem first. We were still using the old, dull backsaw. Ick. As we inspected the progress we noticed that some of the in letting wasn’t deep enough and we talked about scabbing on strips to those frames so that when we faired them, the fit would be better. We also talked about doing that to the front of the stem to increase the contact surface between the plywood and the stem. We quit on the day, leaving the chines to do the next session. In part because we were still puzzling on how to shape the keelson and get the chines positioned on the stem.