Buying oak wood is a real challenge. I’ve called some lumber dealers but the offer is very rare. If they have it in stock, they sell it only to professional carpenters. So I had to think about alternatives. 

The wood in the do-it-yourself stores is very poor quality. I picked out the best pieces and wanted to glue the 26mm boards together as suggested in Piotr’s blog if you can’t find a suitable size. With god’s will I passed coincidentally a barrel maker’s workshop with many oak planks in stock. Luckily the boss was there and we explored his workshop for the right pieces. There where some oak beams leftovers. I took 5 of them and load them in my VW Transporter.

The difficulty was to plan the slightly curved beams flat when you don`t have a surface planer. So I have to come up with other techniques. I aligned the raw planks on a slide for the thicknesser and started to plane them flat side by side. Then I sawed the right angle with the table saw. Some hours later I had the squared keel beams.

After that they still have to be trimmed according to the dimensions of the plan. To do this, I printed out the plan from B&B Yachtdesign in 1:1 scale and cut it with scissors. I taped this template to the oak beam and traced the shape. Then I used the miter saw to make the angle cuts with some safety distance on the outer edges of the keel beams.  I’ll do the tapering and cutouts for the stringers later when the keel beams are already glued in to the floor section.

It is also essential to round off the top edges before glueing in the keel beams. Rounding them off when they are installed in the boat is to hard.

The keel floor on the left has 2 peg holes for anchoring the mast supports of Frame D`.

There is an excellent plan to set up the jig from the US-CNC-Kit supplier B&B Yachtdesign. However, it is important to think about some details before setting up the jig. This will save you time-consuming doublework. I put many ideas from my colleagues who have already completed these steps during their build into my concept.

The first thing I needed was a underlayer foil to protect the floor from dirt. A laser-level is a must have. It’s also worth thinking about how you want to turn the hull later and maybe you need later support rollers to move the jig / hull.

I bought 6 meter long spruce / fir squared timber and at the same time Siberian larch in 6 meter length for the stringers. In order to protect the workshop floor, I lay a thin cardboard to the floor and fixed it with tape. Then I installed the workbench at the head end. I attached the laser level at the hight of the waterline  to the workbench. So I have a fixed reference point and can check the symmetry of the construction at any time.

To strengthen the jig I installed some struts to make it torsion-resistant. I checked repeatedly all dimensions with the laser and a long aluminum slat.

In total i needed ca. 42 meter squared timber.

2x 500 cm longitudinal beams -> 10
5×115 cm cross beams -> 5,75
10x 150 cm frame beams -> 15
1x 300 cm v-shape in front of the jig -> 3
2x 80 cm S frame beams -> 1,6
4x 150 cm bracing beams -> 6

Hull construction is getting closer!