gunwales

 Over the last several days I have been cutting and gluing the gunwales and deck carlins (edge supports that run the length of the boat.  They're long and a little floppy at only 1/2" thick.  The first thing I had to do was put in the side deck knees.  A couple of pairs are part of bulkheads, as you can see in the photo below by looking forward, but there were two sets that were stand alone as well.

After ripping down a board into the right widths using a table saw, I had to trim them from 5/8" thick to 1/2".  To keep the boards tight against the fence and top, I used a couple of fingerboards.  They keep pressure on the board but allow it to smoothly feed through.

Since the boards were only 10' long, and the gunwales are about 16' long I had to scarf  pieces together.  This is the pieces set up for cutting a 9 to 1 scarf with the block plane.  It took about 15 minutes, but I neglected to get a pic of the completed scarfs.  I then did the same thing for the deck carlins.

Weights come in handy for gluing.  Trying to keep 20' of wood aligned while using clamps across a 4.5" glue line is not easy.  However, laying them on a flat surface allows the use of a 48" metal ruler for alignment and allows for sliding the lower scarf into place.  Since epoxy doesn't need much clamping pressure. I got good results with this method.

After gluing I checked the fit of the gunwales and made sure I had enough clamps.  Then I did some final shaping with the block plane to round over the bottom edge and taper it toward the bow and stern.  Gluing took quite a while.  First I had to wet everything out with un-thickened epoxy, (64' worth).  Then I had to spread thickened epoxy (32') and then get everything clamped up.  After that I had to clean up and fillet the squeeze-out.  That took a couple of hours.  As you can see below, you can always find a use for lots of clamps.  I used every single one I had, and it seemed to be just enough.  I'm sure If I had another 5 I would have found a use for them as well.