Bottom Battens

I'll start off by acknowledging that I'm not a good blogger, in the sense that it takes three months between updates. My apologies, and thanks for continuing to read.

Now that that's out of the way, I'll move on to the next step in the building process, which is the bottom battens. As mentioned in the last post, when Mike was here, we did some work pre-fairing the battens, especially toward the bow. There's a lot of extra material in that area of the battens, and we removed it to save some time later. I suppose it doesn't really matter when you remove the material - before or after installation - but you'd probably end up re-countersinking the screw holes if you were to do all the fairing after gluing them in place.

Here is a picture of the battens during the process of fitting them. I've got a couple clamped in and am checking spacing, bending and their general fit:



The idea with the battens is that they support the bottom planking and also (obviously) help determine the general shape of the hull. It's important to have contact between the battens and the planking at all points. This is generally true with this boat, though there are a couple of points where I had to rely heavily on epoxy to make things secure.

Here's a great picture of the battens as they are being glued into place. In case you didn't believe previous posts, I do in fact have a ridiculous number of clamps:



The hardest part of this process was finding a good place to clamp to, especially considering the wax paper I had to use at the wood-clamp interface to prevent the clamps from becoming a part of the boat. For those of you building this boat, let me tell you this - after you glue and screw the battens in place, you'll have to fair them. At some points, you may end up removing a lot of material, and may need to resink your screws so that the screw heads remain below the surface of the batten (and thus remain out of the way of your plane blade). So, when you first glue these in place, make sure you have a strategy for being able to remove the screws once the glue is dry. I suppose there are two ways to do this: 1. don't use any screws until the glue is cured, or 2. make sure you countersink the screws deeply if you use them while the glue is still wet.

Here's the 3332 shop's best and most beautiful assistant: