Deadwood; a Different Approach.

As I have said previously, we are renting whilst we have a new workshop built -with attached house- and so I am only fabricating the pieces to be made before building the jig.

One of the subsequent benefits of only doing pre-jig items is that I have amply time to peruse the plans before venturing into each piece.

And once again, those who have gone before me have shown some of the difficulties, this time with the deadwood.

I don’t have a bandsaw (as I don’t want to move a few 100kg of machine to the new workshop), and even if I did, looking at other blogs, the deadwood doesn’t seem to lend itself to easy bandsawing.

And so with the dread of having to handsaw the final shape of what is a very hefty piece of timber, I sought a different approach.

So I pondered the plans some more.

It is apparent that a lot of trimming of the complete deadwood could be avoided if the laminates were shaped closer to the finished shape before the big glue up.

JBs plans show the half-sections for every second laminate, so I transferred these onto the planks and cut them out before epoxing the stack.

As soon as I laid them out it was apparent that I was saving a lots of good Celery Top Pine. Enough in fact, that I had two planks left over; which later, were sufficient for the Stern Post

1 Deadwood Layout 

I used 1 inch planks as they were easier to obtain and consequently had to start by laminating them together.

2 Deadwood 1st epoxy

Having laminate them together, I then set about cutting them to the half breadths from the FSPs

As the half-breadths for only every second piece is shown on the FSPs, I cut every second plank to the half-breadth of the one above; the larger one. The result is apparent in the following picture.

3 Deadwood dry fit

As you can now see, there was going to be very little wood to remove after glue up.

Unlike the approach of gluing up the whole unshaped planks.

Additionally, the steps between the planks mark the points to which the glued up block needs be planed, as shown below with the blue arrows marking the points to give the final shape. i.e. the red line.

In fact it took no time at all to plane of the steps and sand the whole to the finish shape.

3a Deadwood planing datums

This method also makes it simple to check you have everything covered before the dreaded epoxy is applied and that the stack is the required shape.

4 Deadwood layout check

Another advantage of this method is that you have the gentle curve of the sides right from the beginning with out having to produce it with a bandsaw or hand saw at a later stage.

As the following two pics show there was not much material to remove to have the sides looking fair.

6 Deadwood sides rough

7 Deadwood sides dressed

Having shaped the sides I roughed out the faces for the keel and lead keel with a handsaw.

8 Deadwood rough sawing bottom

The stern post was then fabricated from the left over celery top pine and epoxied onto the deadwood.

9 Deadwood & Stern Post Epoxy

Taking a clue from other blogs - notable Jeff Patrick and Paul Embla - I plan to make a template of the stern post, deadwood and keel and use it to shape the lead keel mould. Particularly as the plans for the keel mould show a straight face where is meets the keel and clearly this needs to be curved.

14 Deadwood & Stern post 3/4F

12 Deadwood & Stern post Side