Today we are re-filming the gunwale layout and mortising portion of our free kayak building prep course. My goal here as always is to try to save people from mistakes they don’t know they’re about to make:
1) Laying out the sheer of the gunwales opposite the natural curve of the board.
2) starting on the wrong line and cutting an embarrassingly long rib mortise slot.
3) cutting mortises of uneven depths.
4) cutting the wrong angle of deck beam mortise in the wrong location.
5) cutting the rib mortise slots on the deck beam marks.
6) cutting the deck beam mortise on the wrong side of the gunwales.
7) cutting the angles for the ends off the top rather than the bottom of the gunwales.
Five of these are get a new board and start over mistakes. You would think that just reading a list like this and keeping it in your mind would be enough but that’s not how mistakes happen, usually you know what not to do you just end up doing it anyways! The key to avoiding mistakes is to build it into the process with reference marks and reminders at critical junctures.
Personally I am incredibly prone to errors so in a lot of ways I’m the idiot that this idiot proof system was designed for!
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See the original post and discussion here.
