I found it difficult to find the exact shear line on the forms. So I tried to find the line with a strip. I did not have straight strips. The poplar boards where straight but the wood had a lot of tension because of different growing speed. After ripping the strips wobbled. Afterwards I think that the best remedy had been to scarf the straight parts together into one long strip. But I used the strips as they where. I made the shear line symmetrical on both sides.

For the stem and the bow I needed the heat gun to get the strips in place. I found it difficult to spread the heat evenly over the strip. Maybe all things will come right later. I did follow the shear line with 2 strips. The rest of the strips followed the chine more at the ends so I need cheater strips but that is not a problem.

I found it difficult to make the right bevel. So I decided to staple the strips with no bevel at all and later fill the gaps with thickned epoxy.  I tried to use no glue at all but had so much difficulties with lining the strips between the forms that I decided to use a gap filling glue. It is the PU-glue which is used in wood construction. This one gives transparant glue lines. The problem is that epoxy does not hold very well on PU. So I have to use a primer to tackle that problem after wetting out the wood.

At the chine I did split my strips (22 mm wide) into 10.5 mm wide strips. I used a Japanese razor saw (not a genuine Japanese saw but a European copy sold by Aldi for 12 euro’s, handle with two blades) and a kind of miter box for splitting. The saw line is not totally straight but I put the devided strips next to each other so that it fits. Afterwards I did see that the line wobbles. Maybe that will disappear when I have sanded the hull.

I made a box beam following Nick’s book. I did use an inferior quality of underlayment 19 mm thick. The result is a box beam that is not complete linear. Therefore I made the openings in the frame 1 cm wider then the prescribed 2 by 4 inch.
I draw a straight line on top of the box beam and centered the frames on that line. The rest went as described in Nick’s book.

The box beam is placed on an external strong back. This gives place for equipment like staplers, saws and heatgun.

I used the method described by Björn Thomasson (http://www.thomassondesign.com/building/building_manual/preparations.aspx). At first I prepared my circular saw with a wider foot plate and a longer fence.

I thought it worked reasonable well but I payed not enough attention to the strip width. Now I have strips with varying strip thickness. I think the sawdust coming between board and fence caused the difference. I tried hard to keep the fence against the board but sometimes there was a little gap which i could not pull tight.
So now I have to use strips with different thickness and that will give a lot of extra work in sanding.

Next time I will make my strips on a table saw.