Here's a detail of the butt block. This is glued and screwed to one of the two pieces being joined (e.g. the aft port planking in this instance), and then that second piece (e.g. the forward port planking) is glued and screwed to the butt block.
Then Mike showed up this past weekend. Friday evening, we became acquainted with a fantastic (and I mean fantastic) sipping rum - Prichards - which you should try on crushed ice with a squeeze of lime. The first thing we did on Saturday was to finish up the side planking. This ended up taking a lot longer than I had anticipated, mostly because I hadn't done as much prep work as I thought I had. Here's what it looks like with the planking applied and the clamps removed:
It's really starting to look like a boat. Here's a detail of the side planking joint:
I really like the industrial look of the rows of screws, and kinda wish I could keep them exposed. The plan is to fill them with putty and paint the hull, so no one will see them once the hull is finished. That's probably a good thing. Realistically, with the inherent strength of epoxy holding this thing together, the screws are more of a liability than a benefit. In fact, the only thing they really did in this instance was to hold everything together while the epoxy cures. Oh well. I can be a purist on the next boat. (That won't happen, but at least I have that option on the next one.)
After installing the side planking, Mike and I started working on the bottom battens. Turns out that the notches in the transom frame members required a lot of working to accept the bottom battens, so we spent a couple hours working on those on Saturday before we pulled the plug. On Sunday, we finished up the transom notches and did some shaping/fairing of the battens themselves. I think we did enough to allow me to continue on by myself, and then Jen can hopefully give me a hand when it's time to get them installed. We also spent some time on Sunday doing various other tasks, including removing the screws holding the boat to the jig. Unfortunately there were a few screws in the breasthook that I should have removed before applying the side planking. Here I am removing those screws, about as happy as I could be given the quarters:
