S/V Ripple

I started assembling the case today, realizing it is going to take several stages (days) of glue-up to put it all together.  Taking a cue from the book (duh), i decided to glue just one of the cheeks to the case uprights.  It will be best to paint the insides before assembling the case, and I may even include a few inches of anti-fouling paint on the lower few inches. Tomorrow I'll glue the other cheek to the assembly, and fit it into the slot in the keel to make sure it will go together and mate with the floors at stations 2 and 3.   The third stage will be to add the end cap, logs, upper rails, and topcap.  There will be some additional cosmetic trim pieces that will hide the aft edges of the case cheeks and improve the visual balance of the case.  All but the top-cap will be painted.  The top cap will be finished bright, as it will be perpendicular and contiguous with the midships thwart.  The other thwarts, quarter knees, knee braces...

Today I sorted out the daggerboard case.  It is the focus of quite a lot of stress during sailing, not a component to be underbuilt.  It wasn't clear to me how best to integrate it with the midships thwart and the floors at stations 2 and 3.  My MO is to work through it a a component at a time, and see if they all work together.  I just don't have the experience to lay it all out on paper and do it. At a late moment, I decided to make the dagger board only 9 inches fore-and-aft (the plans specify 12), and the slot in the bottom is 12 1/4 inches long.  My reasoning was that I've seen lots of daggerboards for small boats closer to 9 than 12, and on Ripple, storage is an issue, and a 9 inch board would be easier to stow.  Oh, and I had a suitable piece of sitka spruce 9 inches by 4 quarters.  And straight and true. This meant re-engineering the case verticals to fill in the 3+ extra inches.  Doing so has the additional benefit of st...

Floors are really just partial ribs, giving some additional structure to the bottom of the boat, as well as providing bearing surfaces for the removable floorboards.  They straddle the keelson, spanning the garboard and second strake, and are glued in with epoxy.  I elected to pattern each with scraps of planking material... easier to shape than the 4/4 yellow cedar.  Still, spiling the shapes to the bottom at each of 4 stations turned out to be fussy work, especially for the first couple.  Running out of propane for the heater in the middle of the work made for a long session. When each pattern was close, I traced the profile onto cedar blanks and bandsawed them to shape, and adjusted the profile as necessary with a block plane.  I improved sufficiently over the sequence to motivate me to redo the first of them. I left the floors at stations 4 and 5 un-shaped on the top. as I have not yet decided how to tie them into the daggerboard case. About 6 ho...