Yesterday I finished laying out the templates for a few of the station frames along the length of this 1.05% scale St. Lawrence River skiff, and today I laminated the frames with a core of red cedar between strips of mahogany on the outside.
I also did the layout on a template for 1/4 of the bottom board, which definitely gave my sputtering brain cells a bit of a workout because I’m putting a pedal drive in this boat and there’s a LOT of things to consider.
Rather than integrate a plywood base plate into the framing the way that I do with my canoes, for this boat I decided to connect the drive box directly to a wider bottom board — which has advantages and disadvantages. It’s an elegant solution that saves weight in the drive box assembly but costs weight in the overall larger size of the keel. It also means that I need to glue transverse reinforcing strips onto the keel because unlike a guideboat, the majority of the frames won’t have a
“foot” on them, and without that the tension of the skin would crack the bottom board in half. The strips didn’t take long and don’t add much weight.
If I wasn’t adding the pedal drive, this would be easier and I could just use the size of the original keel. One nice thing about a wider bottom board, however, is that you can armor it with strips of plastic and it takes most of the abuse of dragging over things. I really loved that about my guideboats.
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