Building the Deck

Today's job, making and dry fitting the deck, was like many tasks which I worried about in advance, but which turned out to be pretty straightforward when I set to them. Is there a lesson there? 

I laid out plywood pieces, mainly offcuts from previous parts, over the areas to be covered, trimmed their ends to match, and tacked them down.

Then I scribed a line under the deck pieces along the chine, to give me an outside cut line. For the inside cut line, I tacked a long piece of molding, about 1/4"x1 1/2", to all the frames and up against the deck pieces. Then I reached under and scribed a line on the underside of the deck pieces along the molding. That line, of course, would be too far inboard by the thickness of the molding, which I would need to allow for. As a cross-check, I reached further inside where I could and marked along the inside of the molding. I have learned that when you do something blind, the result looks like it is made by a blind man. I learned it from painting, but it applies to scribing cut lines as well. When I pulled the pieces off to cut them, the outside lines, which I could see while drawing them, had turned out fine. And indeed the two inside lines looked like they were drawn by a blind man. Now here was a situation where my career experience could have been put to use. I could have calculated a least-squares line and have known that I had a mathematically optimum cut line. But something told me if I tried that God would punish my pride and I would end up with ruined expensive pieces of plywood. Instead, I just tacked a thin batten along the lines I had drawn, and marked a kind of consensus fair line to cut to. Naturally, that turned out to be right on.

After all the pieces were cut out I tacked them down again, marked match lines, and screwed butt straps underneath. The deck is done to the dry fit stage.

The forward piece, where the two side decks ("washboards") come together near the bow, will need to be cut out; but I won't know by exactly how much until I make the coaming and the piece near the bow where the coaming of the two sides comes together.

I plan to make the coaming tomorrow. It will be laminated of two thicknesses of 6mm plywood. Before shutting down today I tacked the coaming pattern, made previously, and verified I can rely on it as a pattern to cut out the coaming pieces. The coaming itself will provide the fair line on the inboard edge of the deck, to correct for the cutting irregularities I know I have made. Any gap remaining will be filled with thickened epoxy, and fabric will cover the deck and at least the outside of the coaming.