Most of the wood in my boat, if not okoume plywood, is cedar. At the start of the build I went and bought a few big pieces of clear cedar thinking I’d need them for all sorts of parts. As it turns out, I used a lot of them for cleats, which would have been fine with good ol cheap pine 2x4s from the local home improvement store, but oh well.
Scarfing #
As it was, I thought that I’d use the cedar to build the carlins and gunwales. Only problem was that it wasn’t long enough - I bought 8' boards but needed closer to 13’ for the gunwales. So I set out to scarf them using a jig I built that would give me a 10:1 scarf.
It worked pretty well, and I scarfed together five different lengths of cedar to give me enough pieces to do the carlins and gunwales with one left over.
And then I figured out - wait, I’m going to have to steam bend these. And epoxy doesn’t like getting steam-levels-of-hot. Crap.
Steaming #
So then I went and bought a very long, very expensive piece of clear vertical grain (cvg) fir, and ripped it down to the necessary size to support gunwales and carlins.
I built a little steamer out of two 10’ lengths of 4" PVC pipe capped on both ends and connected by a T (for some reason I didn’t take any photos of this at all).
And then I invited over my dad, brother, and a nephew to help steaming and clamping the gunwales on to the boat. A few things learned:
- In order to give them a “dry run”, I had them bend on one of the scarfed cedar pieces just so they could get the hang of it. Turns out while they did this, the cedar didn’t break.
- The steamer setup didn’t work very well. The first piece was held in steam only and it only sort of got hot (I was using a wall paper steamer as my source of heat and this wasn’t powerful enough). It had an effect on the wood, but not much.
- The second piece of wood was actually sitting in some water that had collected in the steamer, and when that piece came out it was super bendy and easy to put on the boat.
So next time, check to see if steaming is really necessary, and if it is, consider just straight up boiling the wood as opposed to steaming it - it’ll probably work better.
Gunwales #
First gunwale bent on
After getting the outer gunwales bent on, I left them clamped to the boat for a couple of weeks while life (Christmas, gall bladder removal, etc) got in the way.
When it was time to attach them for good, I drove a few pilot holes for screws both through the gunwales from the outside in and from the inside of the hull out through the gunwales. These kept the pieces aligned during glue up.
Turns out I must not have used the right size pilot hole bit since I had the pieces start to split on me in a couple of places as I tightened the screws down, but none of them broke outright and they were all being epoxied in place along their length so I didn’t worry about the cracks much.
Carlins #
For the carlins, I decided I’d put on the carlins one at a time, gluing the first to each of the bulkheads, waiting for that to setup, then gluing the second along the entire length to the first. This worked really well and needed no screws and resulted in no split wood.
First carlin clamped on
I also decided to try using the cedar pieces instead of the fir. I don’t really know why I decided to try this, other then just to see if it was possible. Maybe I thought I could find another use for the spare fir strips I cut out but would have a harder time finding a use for the spare scarfed cedar strips.
As it turns out, I was able to bend them in without needing to steam them first just fine.
The pictures above don’t really do it justice, but the other effect (unintended in the moment but kind of obvious in hindsight) of using the scarfed cedar strips is that even though I ensured that the scarfs didn’t line up side by side in the two strips for a given carlin, the first carlin that went in wasn’t the most fair of curves becase that scarf had a hard time bending.
So the carlins aren’t the most fair. It’s most obvious on the port carlin up around bulkheads 2 and 3, so probably won’t be noticeable in the finished boat, but still kind of annoying. The clear fir wouldn’t have had this problem I’m sure.
After the carlins setup, it was time to plane down the tops of both gunwales and carlins to get them to flat and matching the tops of the bulkheads. I mostly used my spokeshave and a small handplane for this.
