Over the years(!) that I’ve been working on the project, people often ask me “how’s the boat going?” And for most of those years, I haven’t had anything that looked vaguely like a boat. I’ve had big sticks (the spars). I’ve had a collection of parts in a pile, and some of them were even recognizable as boat parts. It always felt a bit silly to talk about it as “the boat” when it was just…parts. But now I finally have something that is, at least, a “boat shaped object.”

It’s been pointed out (mostly by my younger kid) that the boat, in its current state, would not float. That’s a fair point, but I’m still marking this as a sign of progress.

(And, in fairness, I’ve actually had most of these bulkheads on the building frame for a few months, but I’m just now getting the chance to write it up. I’ve also, as you can see from the last few posts, taken quite a number of detours over the past few months.)

At this point, none of the bulkheads / frames (I’ll use those words interchangeably) have been glued down. I’m going to try to dry fit as much as I can before breaking out the epoxy. That’s in large part because I want to make absolutely positively sure that I have everything lined up just right before I take any steps that will be difficult and expensive to undo.

This starts with carefully making sure the building frame is level. The frame is on wheels, and the floor isn’t perfectly flat, so every time it gets moved, I need to make sure I’m not building on a twisted frame.

(As an aside, one of the things I recently noticed is that the screws that came with the retractable casters weren’t doing a good job “staying put” – that is, the weight of the frame was pulling them out of the soft Doug fir legs. The solution: through bolts. I shoulda done that from the get-go.)

I’ve also stretched centerline strings both above and below the frames, and I’m carefully aligning all of the parts against those centerlines.

The centerboard trunk needs to be centered, as you’d imagine from the name. I decided to 3D print some spacers that fit exactly in the slot, and had a notch for the string. Not having any skills in 3D modeling, I did what anyone would do in 2026 and asked ChatGPT to generate me a file that I could print. After some back and forth (describing what you want a 3D object to look like in words is surprisingly difficult!), I was able to get a file and print it out. They look like this:

I’m using a pinch rod to carefully measure the distance between frames to make sure they’re the same on both sides of the boat. I noticed that a few of the frames in the middle were a couple of millimeters off. Now, I’m not sure that a few millimeters here or there really matters, but I’d still rather be accurate now than sorry later. I think the solution is to extend a support (aka a piece of scrap wood) from the bulkhead supports to the tip of the frame, since the parts without much support are just a bit off. (See one of the middle frames in one of the earlier pictures – note how there’s a pretty big gap between the plywood supports and the tip of the frame.) And, to do that for the frames that attach to the centerboard trunk, I’m going to need to actually glue them first so I know they’re fully seated home.

Which leads me to the next issue: there’s no easy way to clamp the frame in place during the glue-up. On the plus side, because I’m using epoxy, I don’t need a ton of pressure (like you do with PVA glue), but I do need to make sure the frame is fully inserted and perfectly square.

You can get a sense of the problem in the photo below. See how it’s not fully in, and there’s a bit of a gap on the top and bottom of the piece? And see how there’s really nothing to clamp to?

Here’s what I came up with: I’m using a couple of these nifty reversible clamps to push against a piece of wood that then pushes the frame into the centerboard case. Think: a clamping caul, only in reverse.

Then, I’m clamping a couple of clamping squares to the top of the frame and the centerboard case to make sure that the frame is 90° from the case.

It was a bit too cold in the shop to actually do the glue-up, so I’ll give that a shot once it gets a bit warmer. They’ll likely be the only parts I glue until I’m confident that everything lines up just right.