Propeller and Deck Planking

In an attempt to clear up my confusion about the propeller calculations I bought a copy of Dave Gerr's "Propeller Handbook".   This book has far more information than I need but I will follow his process carefully to determine the diam,eter and pitch of the propeller. It will be interesting to see how the result compares with the prop that is on the boat.

I have been working on the planking of the deck. There will be a "margin" plank 65mm wide around the gunwales and the coaming. Along the sides of the boat the 2 planks (along gunwale and around cockpit coaming) will over lap so they will be done in a single piece. I made templates out of cheap plywood for all the pieces because they are all curved. The templates were laid out on the planking stock to minimise waste. The stock was marked and the pieces cut out. Each piece was carefully trimmed to fit in its place and then they were all glued down. A couple of photos show the pieces being glued using 200 mm square concrete pavers.

One drawback of using pavers is that they make it diffcult to clean off any squeezed out epoxy so this has to be removed after it has set and the pavers removed. The trimming of the pieces and gluing them down was done in stages over a period of 3 days.

Here is a photo of the aft deck with the margin and king planks in place.

The space in side is going to be planked with parallel strips of white beech. The beech I bought was rough sawn 100 x 50 mm and 3 metres mm long. I put it through the thicknesser to reduce it to 45 mm thick and then through the bandsaw to get strips 45 x 8 mm.

I rough cut and laid the strips on the deck with 4mm gaps. Here are photos of both fore and aft decks with the strips on.

It will take 2 or 3 days to cut the strips accurately and glue them in pace - more paver clamping!