I have only had the opportunity to work on this boat project a couple of times since my last post so here is an update. Here you can see the first Frame mounted to the keel. I used an electronic level to help with the mounting.
The first thing that I was able to do was to build the strongback. The strongback will give me a straight solid piece to mount the keel too and give me a baseline to measure from. The instructions suggest to use a straight piece of wood mounted to a couple of saw horses. I felt that I would like to build something a little more solid so I made a torsion box from 2x6"s. Then clamped that box to a folding table giving me the flexibility to move it around. A straight line was drawn on the strongback to lay the keel onto.
This boat isn't even done and it has already been in the lake...
I needed to soak the strips of 1"X3/4" western red cedar for a day so I could pre-bend the gunwales. The last boat I built, I made a tube from 4" PVC but that was only 10' long and these pieces were 14' long so that would not work. I came up with the idea of tying a piece of rope to a couple of cement blocks and tying that to to 14' strips of wood (4 of the them) an throwing them into the lake. They soaked in the lake for a day and then my brother Gary and I filled a couple of 5 gallon buckets with water and hung them from the wood until they dried. The wood dried in 24 hours.
