Beautiful Bottoms

 The scarfs of the two bottom pieces were cut on July 3rd and 4th, and glued together on July 5th and 6th.  Sorry, no pictures.

This week I lofted the outlines of the bottom from the plans to the plywood. The plans give measurements at each of the frame locations, every 30 inches.  To get a better fit, I plotted this using a drafting program on my computer and fit a 'spline' to those measurements.  Then captured measurements every 12 inches.  Lofting both sets of measurements to the plywood.

I pegged some small nails at each of the lofted points.  Then down to my local lumber store for a 12-foot long, straight piece of molding and bent it to the nails, holding it in place with weights. Tracing this gave a nice curve.

After aligning the two bottom layers, I secured them together with a dozen screws. Cutting both bottom pieces simultaneously with a jig saw.  There were a few places where the cut was either not perpendicular or wobbly from having a hard time keeping to the line.  These I cleaned up using 60-grit sand paper on the random-orbital sander.

Here's a few pictures of the completed bottoms as of July 9th.  (The beer bottle and can are for size perspective, and if you don't know what size a beer bottle/can is... that's just un-American!)

 

Finished size of the bottoms is roughly 5 feet wide by 17 feet long.  The bow certainly looks more pointy than it does on the plans, but the overall curves are beautiful to see in person!