Building a Wooden Boat With a Young Student – Part 2

Once the boat’s hull was completed (read part 1), Thano turned to work on lowering the surface of the deck. First, and with the help of our dent-inhibiting Homasote liners, he clamped the hull between the two jaws of the vise. Then via a series of shallow holes that he drilled into the deck, he was able to remove most of the wood.

Drilling from above is easier if you, or your student, are tall enough. But drilling parallel to the floor (see next drawing) is more suitable for younger students.

Now with the help of #7 gouge, he scooped the remaining wood. To overcome the difficulties of gouging in small spaces and especially in the corners where the newly formed wooden bulwark meets the deck, Thano made used of bent and spoon gouges of various sweeps. Lastly, to flatten the new deck surface even more, he incorporated some #5 and #3 gouges.

The new deck looked quite nice but we decided to make it even nicer by shaping a flat strip of wood in the contour of the new dug out deck, and glue it over it. This way, we thought, we would have a perfectly flat deck. To do so we cut a template from a piece of paper and after matching it to the surface of the deck we outline what need to be cut. After the lined deck was sawn to shape we chamfered its underside contour to allow it to nest neatly over the gouged surface. The all-around chamfer made it easier to tuck it in over the rounded bulwark/gouged-deck intersection. At this point, we mixed epoxy adhesive with some sawdust to make a “peanut butter”-like paste and glued the lined deck down.

Once the epoxy cured, and to make the boat’s bulwark even more convincing, Thano sawed off, gouged and filed flat the bulwark middle portion on both starboard and port. Now we were ready to work on the masts and booms.