Planing the bottom and Goat meets trailer

The epoxy had set nicely overnight so it was time to flip the boat over and plane the chinelogs flat to accept the bottom panel.  We turned the boat upside down and placed it on two sawhorses.  Rather than trying to support the hull by the still somewhat flimsy hull sides we placed the saw horses under bulkheads.  This put the boat at a perfect height for putting some ass behind the plane.  The plane does not like hitting the epoxy joints between the bulkheads and hull sides.  I first used a coarse rasp to knock down the epoxy goobers so that the plane would not get hung up on them.

 Up on sawhorses



 From the stern

The deckplate cutouts provided the perfect place to clamp the boat to the sawhorse for stability.

Having at the chinelog.  Cedar is so easy to work with a sharp plane.

Planing around

Used a long level to check that the bevel angle planed into the chinelogs was just right for the bottom panel to lay flush.

I decided to plane down to the outside edge of the ply rather than planing to the inside edge.  I did this mainly out of laziness but also because the bulkheads were aligned with this edge so it saved a lot of planing of the bulkheads.  The little void will be filled with thickened epoxy which may, as a side benefit, toughen up the chine some and help prevent denting from rocks etc...... maybe.

We trial fitted the boat to it's trailer.  The trailer is our old kayak trailer so now we will have to load kayaks up onto the roof rack.  That's no fun but we can't have any more trailers in the yard :-)  I'm planning on replacing the tongue with a slightly longer one and extending some wooden bunks aft to support more of the stern.  The boat will live on this trailer for the rest of the build which makes it easy to move around.

Total time to date: 205hrs