KVARK – the homebuilt microcruiser

Another day’s work and again some progress. The bottom plate is now glued in place and it is much better than could have been expected – it’s as tightly against the keelson as it can be. The central joint could be a bit better, but overall it’s good and straight. Now we’ll be fitting the lowest stringers – we cut them from a 25x50x4500 mm piece of wood by splitting it lengthwise with a blade saw. Who needs a sawmill, anyway? Turns out wood breaks easily from branch knots so we had to replace one of the bottom stringers, but overall they bent well, considering the amount of curvature.

We also bevelled the sternmost floor timber to the bottom plate – it has to be horizontal on a curved surface. The stern transom is now cut out and ready to be fitted. Tomorrow we expect to cut out all the other arches as well.

Check out the pictures!

After epoxying the keelson and letting it dry we removed the clamps, the keelson seems to be very strong and holding it’s curve nicely. It better be! Next we drew and cut out the bottom panel in two parts and dry-fitted it with screws. The hard part was epoxying the bottom panel to the keelson. We found out that some of the screws were not strong enough and we stripped their heads accidentally, also the plywood was not flexible enough to comfortably bend it to the curve of the keelson. In the end we used a lot of pressure and some improvised clamps and we got a really snug fit.

We also learned that epoxy dries too fast and if you’re working under the pressure of a ticking clock you tend to make mistakes that could have been avoided. The result, however, seems to very good. We’ll see tomorrow how the epoxy is holding, but based on our experience with the keelson, I bet it’ll be rock-solid.

Here are some pictures from yesterday’s build. We spent about 4 hours in the garage.

We have laminated the keelson. That was the first time we ever used epoxy in such quantities. Lets hope that it all went well. The density of the mixture was somewhere between appetizing pancake flour and mayonnaise.