Rails, Outwales, Spacered Inwales, and Final Planks Glued

Been busy on the CLC Annapolis Wherry build here.

Today I glued up the last planks and should be able to start stitching the hull together tomorrow.

The two halves are glued on top of each other to align them. Be sure to have plastic between the glue joints to avoid accidentally gluing the planks together! Yikes.

Also today I glued the rails together. These will be used to make the outwales and inwales later on. But now is a good time to glue the scarf joints while I have the long table set up. I'll be shortening the table when I start to stitch the hull together so that the bow and stern don't hit the ends of the table. That will make more sense later on.

Here the rail sections are laid out and ready for epoxy. I have plastic under the glue joints and clamps ready to go.

Here I'm starting to glue the scarf joints. I first put epoxy on each side of every joint, and then went back and did the clamping.

One hint to mitigate the scarf joints sliding is to place your clamps at the very ends of each joint with half of the clamp face on the main parts of the rails, and the other half over the ends of the scarf joints. They don't slide that way.

I've weighted down one end of the rails, but the other end is allowed to twist and go their own way so long as the joints are straight. It's unnecessary to try to flatten the entire rail and you'll be risk having to put too much pressure on the clamped joints. Just check that the joints are even and the rails run in a natural line.

We opted to purchase the "Spacered Inwale" kit. It will give it a very nice nautical look. Plus, it will stiffen the boat and give places to lash things to. It will be a LOT of extra work though.

Doing the spacered inwales involves several extra steps. The kit comes with a different breasthook than the normal kit, plus different stern knees. The breasthook must be glued together and will have an arched top rather than a flat top in the regular kit.

The next job is to trim the #2 and #3 bulkheads to accommodate the spacered inwales. The bulkheads normally extend all the way to the sheer line, but the spacered inwales drop down 3/4" from the sheer. The thick manual that comes with the spacered inwale kit says to trim the frames after the hull is glued up, but I'm trimming them now and avoiding all that fuss. The hull will come together just fine with the trimmed bulkheads.

Here is the end of one of the bulkheads that has been marked for trimming. After trimming, I will also route out the edge that runs between the sheer and the seat. Doing that will nicely clean up the bulkhead.

More later!

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