Inner & Outer Stem.

Inner Stem.

I was fortunate to be given, generously by fellow woodworker Paul, sufficient Celery Top Pine for the Inner stem.

My son Tim was down from the Philippines for christmas and so was on hand to assist with the stem, which was a blessing, as Tim has lot’s of experience with epoxy from restoring his GRP fishing dinghy, (family skeleton) in particular with making ‘peanut butter’ grade thickened epoxy.

Firstly, we sawed the Celery Top into 4mm laminates with a hand held circular saw (no bandsaw. Yet?) and then put them through the ‘thinesser’ and simply continue making laminates until we had a sufficient stack of them.

We set up the ‘Brooks’ adjustable jig and did a dry bend. It looked good to the inexperienced eye.

Inner Stem Dry Fit.

Donning biological warfare clothing we mixed the epoxy. John said, ‘use lots and squeeze it out’. We used one litre and squeezed half of it out.

Inner Stem Glue up.

And it worked. We did not overbend the jig and on releasing the clamps there was zero spring back.

We fed it through the thinesser to bring it down to the required width. The outside face was then marked and planed off with my fabulous new Veritas® NX60 Premium Block Plane. What a machine. The Porsche of planes. (still no bandsaw).

The same was used to plane the bevel to take the planks.

Inner Stem Shaping.

 

Chuffed with success, we then started on the Outer Stem.
I had settled on Spotted Gum (hard as nails) for the outer stem as in would protect the boat against imprudent running ashore.
Now to find out how workable it was.
We prepared the laminates as per the Inner Stem and then tried a dry fit. It certainly took more effort to bend the Spotted Gum and the Celery Top. Even so I decided not to over bend it as any 'under-bending' could be sorted out when screwing it to the Outer Stem.
When taking the outer stem off the ‘inner stem mould’, it did spring 10mm at each end.

Inner & Outer Stem