Deck Beams, Bulkheads and the Transom - Part 2

I got home from work at about 4:30 after a very early start. The weather is definitely getting better, so the first thing to do was get changed into shorts. The second thing was to make some lemonade. Take a lemon fresh off the tree (larger than I've ever seen in a green grocer's and lots more juice) and squeeze the juice into a tall glass. Add water and drink.


Fully refreshed it was time to complete the athwart ship members. The good news was that on closer inspection, the deck beam that I thought I'd stuffed up was salvageable. The only deep scoring is across the corner that will be cut out to make way for the cockpit stringers, so no real drama.


In order to finish the deck beams, I needed to fashion a rounded sanding block, since a spokeshave had failed to materialise during the course of the day. A bit of scrap timber and a minute or so with my cheapo No.4 smoothing plane followed by a minute with the block plane and a very quick sand and I was ready to go. Using this on the deck beam undersides with some 80 grit paper wasn't a whole lot slower than planing the top edges, although I cut a lot closer to
the line on the undersides, predicting this situation.


All the other pieces went quite well apart from planing the slight curves in the bottom angles of one of the bulkheads. I completely overshot the centre line and had to remake the piece. Since I had the plans back in the garage to mark out the replacement bulkhead (less serious than the deck beam since it uses a lot less ply) I decided to check the profiles of all the pieces. To my delight, all were well within what I consider to be acceptable tolerances. We shall see for real when I start stitching the pieces together at the weekend.