This post covers a lot of aspects of strip planking in just a couple photos and it was nearly 2 whole weeks of work if I am not mistaken. I will try to recount the steps and problems that occured with strip planking as I best I can. The first thing that we did was get two planks down that had their join right down the centerline. These planks had to be tapered and beveled because of the very small area that we have at the bow of the boat but the need to fit as many planks as we can so they nearly go to a point. We added an extra mdf frame between the 0 and 1 frames that ran fore-aft so that we had something a little bit more substantial to stabilized the smaller planks. On the 0 zero frame, most forward, we attached wood blocks just around the smallest opening so that the planks that cant fit into the small hole can rest of the blocks. I can not really explain nor would photos show how incredibly tight the fit was and how hard and long it took but I personally was able to fit the planks. Fitting the planks on the rest of the boat were quite simpler other than the chine plank. The main problem here was that there was so much twist in the shape of the boat aft to forward that the plank nearly could not bend that way. The way that we were able to fix the problem was to run a saw blade down the plank twice. So we split the plank at the forward end into thirds and ran the cut back halfway and two-thirds of the way down the plank. this allowed the individual pieces of the plank to twist easier. This twist is commonly known as edge set. Edge set is a problem because once we would take off the fasteners the plank would just pop back into its normal shape which could break glue bonds or cause the boat to be unfair. After we had a couple of reference planks we were able to just lay other planks into place taper then how they needed to be, this was a very smooth quick process. We used nails to hold the planks in place and then just back filled the planks after they had all cured and were installed.
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