Still planking…

Well it’s going alright! I say this in a slightly surprised, slightly trepidatious (not a word, should be) voice. We’re a little bit behind on our schedule, a couple of jobs have proved more tricky or time consuming than anticipated but generally, yes, it’s going alright. The planks are going on and every day our boat grows and the prospect of her being a buoyant fish-catching entity seems less remote and unimaginable.

A couple of people have said to us, ‘It must be a pretty special feeling, building a boat’. And I’ve been considering this. Part of me says ‘Yes’, cheerfully, while inwardly thinking ‘I am entirely dressed in my husband’s clothes* which are covered in a snot-like sheen of hardened glue even when freshly washed and I have just spent the last half hour in a human rights violatingly small plywood box wiping epoxy into my hair whilst the scratchy radio played Gotye for the fifteenth time today. Yes, yes it is special.’ But it is good to be reminded that it is special and we are building a boat. Clearly the fact that we are building a boat has been apparent to us from the start, but it has not always felt like this. Often it has felt more like we were sanding and epoxying random loveless bits of plywood for no obvious reason and ‘Why am I doing this? I would prefer to be lying on the sofa or on Facebook.’ But now we are getting to the stage where if you can look upside down behind you without falling over at our boat you see an actual boat. I look at it and I can imagine us finishing this boat and it being our boat that we built and that is very exciting and very special indeed.

It also makes the building process more purposeful and enjoyable.  The first few planks went on easily, and we thought we’d be finished with it in a jiffy. Then we got to planking the curvier bits and things slowed down and planks snapped and it felt interminable. And now we’re at the stage where things seem to be settling down. We’ve planked from the top down and the bottom up and now the planks are beginning to meet in the middle on one side and are very close to doing so on the other. On good days we can get about six to eight planks on and on bad days it might just be two. But the light at the end of the tunnel is clearly visible and we’re aiming to have her completely planked by Jubilee. I may regret broadcasting this but there’s nothing like a bit of guilt and failure to motivate you.

We’ve got two different widths of plank. Where we can we use the thicker planks as they cover more area more quickly. However, sometimes the curve of the frames is such that these would be too thick to accommodate this and then we use the thin ones. These bend better, but cover less area, so on a bad day fitting twisty thin planks you can finish thinking that what you’ve done has made no difference at all, whereas on a good day with thick planks you feel like actual Noah.

*They don’t make girls’ clothes you can do work in, just ones you are meant to paint your nails and pout in, whilst holding your stomach in in (in). Boys’ clothes are miles more comfortable and hard wearing than ours and make the accomplishment of routine daily tasks such as bending down to pick things up, walking and breathing a lot simpler and more enjoyable.

The first few planks!

Look, a plank! On our actual boat! It was a very exciting end to the week when we fixed the first plank in place a couple of Fridays ago. We spent a while debating where to put it, which might sound ridiculous but it turns out that in the world of planking, there are many ways to skin a errrrm boat. Sorry…

You could start from the top, or the bottom, or just freestyle it kind of in the middle in the best place where it fits the hull in a nice curve. Essentially you’re going to have to cover every inch of it with planks sooner or later, but it’s important not to make your life unnecessarily complicated. In general, I feel, as well as within a planking context.

So we decided that given the shape of our hull, we would be best to start planking from the sheer (i.e. from nearest the workshop floor) upwards with some wider planks, and then to work from the keel down with narrower lengths and finally meet in the middle with shorter sections.

We’re fixing our planks in a number of ways. Each plank arrived at the workshop machined in a manner similar to tongue-and-groove flooring; one side has a convex moulding and the other a concave moulding. Except that instead of being a square section moulding as with the flooring, it is rounded. This way each plank being joined can accommodate the curve of the hull. It’s called ‘cove and bead’, and it works like this:

We’re glueing each plank to the adjoining one with a polyurethane glue, which foams slightly to provide as tight a joint as possible. We’re then fixing each plank to the frames using plastic nails. Plastic nails? I hear you cry. NAILS, made of PLASTIC??!! Am I hearing you right? Garlic bread? GARLIC? BREAD? But let me tell you now, Peter Kay was right. Plastic nails are the future, we’ve tasted them. Well I haven’t, but there’s no accounting for Simon.

But yes, plastic nails are indeed a revolutionary step and a fairly recent innovation. The ones we are using are made by Raptor Nails and are fired using a pneumatic purpose-designed nail gun (very kindly loaned to us by Steve at Fibrefusion). The advantage of using these is not only the speed and ease with which you can fasten planks to frames, but also the properties of the nails themselves when compared to conventional metal fastenings. They are not only lighter and not going to rust, they can also be easily sanded or cut without needing to be removed when it comes to fairing the hull. We will eventually epoxy fillet bond the planks to the frames as well, and this combination of fastening should give us a very strong and light construction. But most of all, the rapid-firing plastic nail gun has got to be about the best toy ever and it’s a wonder we’ve got any planking done at all really with the amount of other interesting things there are to fire plastic nails at in the workshop, just for fun.

But eventually we got the first plank on, and managed to get three subsequent ones on in the same Friday afternoon, to our delight. The next day we came back to find the planks were all still in place and the joints that had needed glueing had all dried neatly, so we pressed on and managed to end the day with eight planks on each side! The cedar is bending well so far and we’re getting more confident about fixing planks in place as we get used to the materials and find the best way to do it.

Most conversations we’ve had with people in the past few weeks have started – quite understandably – with ‘How’s the boat? Have you started planking yet?!’ To which, having found a multitude of jobs to be done before the first plank could be fitted, the answer has been ‘No’, quite possibly accompanied by a large sigh. To anyone who has been on the receiving end of this, I apologise. But after a productive few days last week, the answer now is a resounding, beaming ‘Yes’. So if you’d all like to ask us again….

Fitting the sheer clamps

While the first coat of epoxy was curing, we made a start on fitting the sheer clamps. These are strips of timber that run along the length of the boat, forming a structural junction between the top of the frames and the deck. Obviously at the moment the top of the frames is the part of the boat nearest the ground. Given that our boat is open, Si designed our sheer clamps to be made up of two layers of Douglas Fir to produce a substantial laminate to stiffen and strengthen the hull.

So far, most of the jobs on the build have been straightforward. Some have required more thought, skill or experience than others, but most have been relatively simple to accomplish with a bit of patience and concentration. Fitting the sheer clamps was the first task we have taken on where we felt we were stepping into the world of more skilled boatbuilding, and we are so grateful that Bob (lovely and excellent carpenter and boatbuilder) was around to give us invaluable help and guidance with the job. We are lucky to have him so close by.

Given that each sheer clamp needed to be about 20ft to cover the length of the boat, we made each one up out of three pieces of Douglas Fir joined together with a scarf. By scarf I obviously mean a nice woolly cashmere one rather than the woodworking type where you join two bits of wood together by glueing one tapering flat surface to another to form a continuous unbroken length.

We fitted the inner sheer clamps on each side first and fastened them at the bow with an oak knee (triangular piece of timber which fits between two bits of wood being joined, a bit like a shelf bracket), which we bolted through at the stem with a stainless steel stud. We also epoxied it to the clamps themselves and secured it on each side with what is essentially a really long screw, but which Simon assures me is called a ‘lag’. Always nice to learn new words for these things.

Once the glue and epoxy had gone off on the first set of clamps, we glued the outer sheer clamps to these and clamped everything in place while the glue dried. There were a lot of clamps. Despite having collected as many G-clamps as we could before starting the job, we still ran out. As more than one wise person told us when they first heard we were building a boat, ‘You can never have enough clamps.’ They were right. We didn’t. But we did have a bit of rope and a stick which combined to form a sort of tourniquet technically known as a ‘Spanish windlass’ which held the sheer clamps in place in the middle, and a bit of rope, two blocks and a jamming cleat which pulled them together at the stern. And combined, they held the whole thing more securely than twenty G-clamps!

We’re really happy with the finished sheer clamps and even more happy that we can now begin planking. There are a couple of small changes that we felt could be made to the design of them from a fitting point of view, so Si’s going to have a look at modifying these and a few other details on the design for any future boats. But overall we are really pleased that the design is working out as Si planned and so far we are confident it could be built by anyone with a reasonable amount of common sense, determination and some really nice friends.

Epoxy coating the frames

Well we finally got to the stage where we felt happy to go ahead with epoxy coating the frames. This makes us sound very assiduous, but in reality we got to the point where we couldn’t face picking up sandpaper, planes and levels any more and decided to just go for it rather than whittling away for the next year and getting nothing done.

The first step was to coat all the joints with epoxy and then fillet bond them with a thickened epoxy mix to glue them firmly in place. The epoxying bit was fine – for some reason epoxy had been looming large in my head since the start of the build as something worthy of trepidation. Certainly it doesn’t come without provisos. But in fact, thanks to Wessex Resin’s excellent calculations and their handy generic fast food chain tomato sauce pump action type epoxy dispensing vats, it has proved to be much cleaner and easier to apply than I thought. In fact it’s a lot more pleasant to use than a lot of household and marine coatings and is gratifyingly shiny.

Fillet bonding – basically similar in principle to sealing around a bath or grouting (sort of) – was a bit of a different story, at least for me. Si made it look really easy, I looked at the boat, cheerfully underestimated the number of joints we had to bond and then doom settled as I tried to neatly apply smooth peanut butter into corners with a glorified ice cream stick. After a small tantrum, much coffee and a bit of practice I also got the hang of it, and now I’m a filleting demon. Who knew?!

Once that was done and the epoxy had cured, we set to work cutting off the wedges that had been hitherto holding the framework in place along with the glue and doing a final once over with sandpaper on the frames.

The next few days were spent applying two coats of epoxy to the frames, to ensure that everything was well covered before we started planking.

After a couple of years of doing painty jobs on Planet with a tiny, potentially rainy place to work in, without the prospect of a hot shower at the end of the day and having to cram everything back into a locker when you finished for the day if you wanted somewhere to sleep that night it was bliss to be able to lock up the workshop and leave everything ready to go the following day.

Thanks to Debs stepping in at the last minute to help us get the second coat of epoxy on before we had to go away for a few days, we managed to get everything done and ready to start planking on our return.

And look how dazzlingly shiny our boat is!

Assembling frames

After a lovely two weeks away, we’ve spent the last fortnight in the workshop. If it wasn’t so infernally cold in there, we may as well have moved in for all the time we’ve spent there, as borne out by the total neglect of our house and the enormous pile of washing that I noticed when I last spent more than five minutes there. So we’re looking forward to a day off this weekend; ideally a sunny one, with lager in it.

But, whingeing about days off aside, we have made good progress and we are delighted to be seeing our boat take shape. Having squared and levelled the jig, we were about to start putting the frames together when a big delivery of cedar and epoxy arrived from Robbins Timber, just at the right time. We spent a while grading and sorting the cedar into the two different thicknesses we’d ordered, and making up bundles to store in the workshop until we need them.

The epoxy system comes from Wessex Resins, and is made by West System. It was originally designed by the Gougeon Brothers specifically for sheathing strip planked hulls like ours. Hamish at Wessex Resins has been fantastic, and has helped us work out exactly what we need for our boat. His advice has saved us so much time and we are very grateful to him.

By the time we’d put all the cedar and epoxy away, with the plywood frames stacked up and the jig in the centre of the workshop, there was hardly any space to move around in, so we spent the next few hours trying to reclaim a path to the kettle and stereo and sorting the frames ready to put up. It’s a good thing we spent two years living in a space the size of a large hotel bathroom.

Putting the frames up and bolting them to the jig carriers was easy and quick, as we’d hoped it would be. Apart from the bow section which took a little longer to bolt together and needed a couple of slots widening to accommodate a change in angle, it all assembled in about the same time as the fifth scale model, which was fantastic and quite a relief!

The keel was the next big job; this is in several sections, and needed fitting and glueing together, as well as fitting and glueing to the hull. This took longer than we’d thought.

Given its overall length and the necessary tightness of the joints on the keel itself and to the frames, we decided it would be best to glue one section at a time, leaving it in place in the frame overnight for the glue to go off, before finally glueing all the sections together and dry fitting them into the rest of the hull.

We spent a few days doing this, starting each day by saying ‘So we’ll fit the keel, then…’ and finishing each day realising that this wasn’t going to happen.

A bit frustrating, but better to do a good job than rush to tick something off a list and find out you have to go back and fix it later. Or, as Si’s mate Windy used to say, ‘Do it nice or do it twice.’ And the keel is fairly important…

While we were waiting for the various sections of the keel to dry, we cut and scarfed the timber for the sheer clamps to make them the correct length for the hull.

These are pieces of Douglas Fir which form the sheer or gunwale of our boat (the bit which will run around the top edge of the boat, like a mantelpiece). More cutting, glueing, planing and sanding, which has so far – unsurprisingly – been a major theme.

The glue we’re using is a polyurethane based adhesive and is very sticky. Not just to the stuff it’s meant to be sticking to, but also to other things like gloveless hands and also trousers, shoes and hair. It takes a relatively long time to tack off, which is great if you’ve got a big gluing job, like our keel, but less good when you have it on your hands and it won’t wash off or stop being sticky. This means that by the time it goes hard it has also gone brown from any pieces of wood or brown things you may have picked up in the interim.  So by now our hands looked a bit like this:

So with the keel all on and the sheer clamps ready to go, we felt we were ready to epoxy coat the frames, epoxy fillet bond the joints and start planking. Now strip planking is not something you want to rush into, and especially not when you are epoxy coating things first. Epoxy is awesome – like the embalming fluid of the marine world. With epoxy, nothing can rust or rot, plus it’s strong and rigid which makes the boat more durable. But, presumably like embalming fluid (although I would imagine this is less of a concern in those circumstances), once it’s on, it’s on and you’re not going to get it off.

Once you look at something with a view to entombing it in exothermic resin forever you start to find all sorts of little things you’d like to do to it first. Like more sanding, planing and bevelling. So we’re not quite ready to begin planking yet, but once we do start we’ll hopefully be doing so with the best framework we can achieve and a better boat in the long run.

Starting to build our boat….

In the last week, the workshop has gone from looking like this….

To like this…..

And underneath the excitingly boat shaped tarpaulin is this….

This is the jig; the platform that will support the hull of our boat as we build it. Si designed it to be profile cut along with the frames, so that the frames themselves fit exactly onto the jig and can be fit into place quickly and accurately.

Once Simon finished designing the boat, he converted his design into kit form, nesting the component pieces for the jig and frames onto a collection of sheets the same size as a standard sheet of plywood. This way the boat could be profile cut by the three axis router at Fibrefusion with a minimum of wastage and a maximum of precision, speeding up the build considerably.

Si picked up the pieces of jig from Fibrefusion on Monday, and I left him at the workshop for a bit while I went to catch up on emails and the blog. By the time I got back the jig was together; it took Si about two hours to assemble the whole thing.

In the second picture of the jig above you will see there is a model sitting on top of it. This is a fifth scale model of our boat (about 1m in length), which Si had cut two weeks ago as a final stage in the process of checking and finalising his design. It is a model of the jig and frames of the boat; if you look at the photos below you can see how the jig of our actual boat is constructed in exactly the same way.

On Wednesday we got a message from Steve at Fibrefusion to say that the plywood for the frames had arrived from Robbins Timber, and later that day we heard from him that the router was in the process of cutting the third sheet of ply.

As far as possible we are using sustainable local sources for our materials, and in every case we are investigating the best way of achieving this. Even if it is not possible or practical to implement these choices this time, we hope that in the future it will be. So our plywood comes from Robbins Timber in Bristol and is FSC certified, which means it comes from a responsibly managed and verified source.

Fibrefusion finished cutting the plywood for the frames of our boat on Thursday and Si went to pick them up in the car. In fact, Si went to have a look at the frames being cut and arrived at Fibrefusion to find they were nearly finished, so stayed and picked them up. It’s a good thing I didn’t go with him in the end; there wouldn’t have been much space!

Thanks to Fibrefusion cutting our frames so quickly and efficiently, since then we’ve been sorting through them, sanding and checking them to ensure that they are all ready to put together and we are now ready to start putting them together. We’re away next week for a few days visiting friends and family but once we get back it shouldn’t be long before we have photos of the frame of our boat assembled in the workshop. Once that is done we can begin strip planking the cedar skin of the boat to the frames.

So after months of thinking and planning in front of a computer and over the phone, everything has finally started to happen. Very, very quickly! Seeing the footprint of our boat in the workshop has made the (slightly scary) enormity of the task ahead sink in, but it’s also made us all the more excited about our project, and we cannot wait to begin!

Finding our workshop…

We’ve spent a while hunting around for somewhere to build our boat, asking around and looking at various possible options. But they were all too small or too exposed, too full of stuff or too far away. Every time we went anywhere in Portscatho or on the Roseland we found ourselves homing in on garages and likely looking barns and more than once Si and I broke off conversation while driving somewhere to say something along the lines of ‘That’s a nice barn. It’d make a good….mmmm.’ Then we’d go back to talking about water ballast or some other such riveting source of in-car entertainment. In our defence, the CD player in the car’s broken and to be honest the aerial’s not that much cop either.

Our search for a workshop was starting to feel a bit fruitless when we were very kindly offered the use of a building in the village. As you can imagine, we were delighted; it’s in the perfect place a short walk from home and the sea and is just the right size for our boat. There were just a couple of obstacles to overcome.  Literally.

After being out of use for a few years, the trees and brambles had started to encroach, and when we first went to look at the workshop you might have missed it if you were looking quickly. With a little help from our friends we set to work clearing a path and by the end of the first day we were already excited about our little space.

Simon, Debs and I spent the next couple of days patching up holes in the roof, reglazing broken windows, fixing lights and clearing space, and we now have a boat shed to be envious of! We are so grateful to Debs for her hard work – we never would have got the workshop ready so quickly without it! Here are the results, in pleasing makeover fashion. Heligan’s got nothing on us…

Making crab pots out of willow

Over the last few years, Simon and I have both been involved in some of the activities run by Caravanserai, an arts residency project run by Annie Lovejoy and Mac Dunlop at Treloan Coastal Holidays along with the campsite owners Pete and Debs Walker. Treloan and Caravanserai have been hosts to everything from wild food foraging to poetry and fire sculpture, and we were delighted when they contacted us to see if we’d be interested in learning how to make traditional crab pots out of willow.

The workshop on Thursday was run by Greg Humphries, who patiently and enthusiastically took us through the traditional method of pot making, helping us at each stage of the process. Greg completed a postgraduate residency at Treloan in 2009, focussing on rediscovering traditional skills for a sustainable future, and learnt how to make willow crab pots a few years ago in Portloe as part of his research.

A number of MA students from University College Falmouth’s Arts and Environment course attended and we had a great day chatting about what we were doing and discussing the implications of sustainability. A friend and former Falmouth Marine School colleague of Simon’s, Rory MacPhee, was also there and we had the chance to catch up with him about his latest project which is very close in spirit to ours. Rory is a sculptor, furniture maker, maritime law expert and currach builder, and is currently using his boat to harvest seaweed in the Carrick Roads. Currachs are Irish skin on frame open boats, similar to coracles, powered by oar. Rory has been a huge help already with our project, introducing us to other people doing similar things to what we have planned and giving us extremely helpful advice, so it was great to see him again and exchange ideas.

Jude and Tony Tomlinson from Treloan Farm were kind enough to let use the willow from their withy bed and we spent the morning cutting enough withies to make three or four pots. In the end Simon and I worked on a pot together to save on time and materials, and by the evening we had a pot that was almost finished. We still need to make a base for it, the sides are in need of extra ribs and it’s somewhat large for purpose, but for a first attempt we’re really pleased. I hope that by this time next year we’ll have several neater, more accomplished willow pots to our name, as well as a few lobsters!

Thank you to Greg and everyone involved in making the day so interesting, informative and such a lot of fun! Also thank you also to Mary Pollard for her fantastic photos of the day; you can find these here. Oh, and we got a little mention in the Falmouth Packet too!

Seafish 3 Week Introduction to Fishing Course in Newlyn

Si finished his Seafish 3 week Introduction to Fishing course down in Newlyn last Friday and is now the proud holder of a shiny new certificate! The course was delivered by Seafood Cornwall Training and Simon was one of a dozen people to be the first batch of candidates to be fully funded to do this course in Cornwall.

The course provided a general overview of the fishing industry and was a mixture of practical and theoretical elements, broken up with trips down to the harbour and to the market to demonstrate what was being talked about in practice. There was also opportunity to talk to people on different fishing boats and chat to them about how they worked.

The course content focussed on a wide variety of subjects from gear construction and navigation to basic engineering and health and safety. By the end of the three weeks, as well as having had the opportunity to use the tools and techniques to make and rig nets, handle and maintain boats and their systems, everyone also left with up to date qualifications in first aid, food hygiene, sea survival and fire fighting.

The teaching was all of a very high standard; without exception the course was taught by industry professionals, and each day was filled to capacity. Si’s found there’s been a lot to take in! Throughout the course there was a strong focus on sustainability, highlighting technical observation methods to produce better productivity and selectivity in fishing. It was clear to Si that Seafish are trying to change the ethos of how people get into fishing and to change working practice for the better.

Si feels a lot more confident now knowing there are other young people choosing to go into fishing, and is extremely grateful to everyone at Seafood Cornwall Training for providing the opportunity and organising the course so well. Having had a chance to talk to people in the business about what they perceive the industry to be, he’s also come away with a strong feeling that there are a lot of public misconceptions about the fishing industry.

Simon was surprised by how easily people talked to him and the other candidates, despite being total newcomers to the industry. Everyone was very ready to answer questions and give opinions and advice freely. Newlyn is good example of one of the few remaining British communities devoted to one industry; almost every person Si met in Newlyn had something to do with fishing, whether it was crewing, delivering, marketing or processing. There are five fish shops in Newlyn, and other than a few small food shops, every other business is related to fishing supplies or support. It was a reminder that unless an industry is supported you can easily lose a whole community. Changes in legislation have a huge bearing on a situation like this and this was a topic which came up again and again.

There seems to be a general feeling that although fishing policies of the past have been frustrating they have also led to the rebuilding of stocks that were quite seriously endangered before. So although legislation is by no means all seen as negative, there is understandable frustration about those regulations still in force that penalise fishermen unnecessarily and lead to high fuel costs, discards and non-sustainable fishing. For example, the perception amongst fishermen based on the fish they are catching is that cod is currently booming. However, the figures for available cod given in scientists’ data and that which is reflected in practice are produced are often collected years apart, and so fishermen experience considerable delay before the MMO (Marine Management Organisation) can address the discrepancies and increase the cod quota accordingly (by 150% in January).

In our experience, public perception of the fishing industry tends to view fishermen using higher impact forms of fishing such as beam trawling as destructive and indifferent to the environmental consequences of their activities. However, as we understand it, things are by no means as simple as this. Although it would be ideal if everyone was fishing sustainably from small boats using hook and line this is not currently practical or viable on the large commercial scale of demand that Britain’s reduced offshore fleet is expected to meet, and without better support it is not possible for them to implement lower impact sustainable methods of fishing.

Si would definitely say that the fishermen he spoke to are more than aware of stocks that are and aren’t safe. They have a very good understanding of sustainability in fishing but lack investment from the government to implement it. Si was shocked by how incredibly expensive commercial fishing boats are and what they cost to run. For example, a set of chain mats for a trawl costing in the thousands will last about four months and then they’ll wear out. Gear has to be replaced on a regular basis and it doesn’t come cheaply; wreck netters have a guy employed ashore permanently who gets a share of the catch because they get destroyed so frequently. So to keep trying new things to improve the situation with regard to sustainability is costly. Every innovation is expensive and fishermen are having to fund it, while often being painted in the media as the villains of the piece.

In fact, everyone Si spoke to was gutted (excuse the pun…) about the issue of discards. It costs fishermen money to catch fish they can’t land; they’ve still had to pay for these fish to be towed along in a net, killed and thrown back over. Imagine if you spent all day doing a supermarket shop; spent hours picking up products, stacking your trolley and pushing it around the store, queuing at the till, spending your money then packing your bags and car boot. Imagine you then get home and unpack it and are forced to throw half of it in the bin knowing it could be eaten. You’d be pretty angry about it.

The issue of discards and quotas was highlighted last year by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Fish Fight. In one episode Hugh looks at discard on a North Sea trawler, and cooks a meal using some of the fish caught that cannot be landed because it is over quota. The rest of the bycatch is thrown away, and they calculate that the fish could have fed two thousand people. You can see a clip here or watch all the episodes here.

There is a sense that the British fishing industry should be better supported by the government in terms of better education and support for boats. It is sometimes seen as a career that you do if you’ve got nothing else and it shouldn’t be. There are extremely skilled people working in fishing and this is underappreciated. Hopefully courses like these will go some way to changing this.

How to make a paper boat

Si’s now produced a flat packed kit of our boat; the frames, transom, keel, everything apart from the strip planking which will form the outside skin of the boat. As soon as we’re ready to start building, we’ll send the kit to be cut from plywood at full size. In the meantime, we’re using it to make test scale models out of card before we commit to buying and cutting large sheets of material. And, of course, to provide you with endless hours of entertainment. I know, we are too kind.

 

So, below you will find a PDF document containing two A4 sheets with the necessary shapes to make our boat. If you click on the link, your computer will download the document so that you can save it, open it and print it as many times as you like. Sheet 1 forms the skeleton of the boat; 3 stations, 1 keel, 1 transom and 4 diagonals. The second sheet contains 2 shapes that make up a skin for the model and provide the same shape that we will eventually achieve in practice with planking. This is just for the purpose of the model, but means it stands more chance of floating and looks prettier too. One quick note about the PDF: make sure when you print that the page scaling option in the print dialogue box is set to ‘None’. This ensures the kit prints out at actual size rather than being shrunk to fit the printer’s margins.

PDF kit

You will need the following:

-         card

-         scissors

-         glue

-         sellotape

I sat down yesterday afternoon and made a model from the PDF while Si was at his course in Newlyn. Being a survivor of left handed (i.e. blunt) primary school scissors, and innately clumsy, I can assure you that this works. If I can do it, you definitely can.

1. Take the first sheet of card.

2. Cut out the shapes. Cut along dashed lines, score and fold along dotted lines.

3. Cut out the Teach a Man to Fish business card. Pin it to your noticeboard. Pass it onto friends or influential acquaintances. Revel in our shameless advertising.

4. Cut slits between the lines on each shape.

5. Score along the centre line of the keel and fold it in half to make it double thickness.

6. Stand up the numbered stations on the keel and slot them into place. ’1” goes nearest the bow. Leave the piece labelled ‘T’ for later.

7. I lost the will to live a little at this point the first time I tried this and went off and ate some leftover Christmas cake. Since then Si’s modified the kit design to make it better, but I can still recommend doing that.

8. Turn the boat upside down. If it feels a bit wobbly use some sellotape to keep everything in place. There’s no shame in doing this, especially if the only Pritt Stick you own is a bit fluffy and dried up.

9. Fit the diagonals to the stations. The two pieces labelled D2 go nearest the keel. The ends with rounded tabs go nearest the stern, and the bits labelled ‘glue’ go towards the bow.

10. Slot the diagonals together like this, and don’t worry if it looks a bit wonky to start with. You can straighten it out later. If it’s really dreadful you might need to get some thicker card or make the slots on the stations a bit bigger.

11. Fit the transom by slotting the tabs together, folding them back on themselves and sticking them in place.

12. Glue together the tabbed and labelled triangles at bow by laying one over the other. Slot into frame at stem.

13. That’s the frame finished! Take a few minutes to check everything’s in the right place, straighten out any wonky bits and put sellotape strategically in places so it can’t fall apart. If you’re not sure, pick it up and drop it. If it falls apart put more tape on it.

14. Take the second sheet and cut out the two pieces. Score along the lines and fold, then sellotape the cut edges together to form two curved shapes. If you score and tape on the labelled side of the pieces, you can then turn it over and pop it into shape so that the blank side will be the one showing when you fix it to your frame. You can colour in or decorate the blank side if you like, and make an even prettier boat.

15. Use the tabs on the skin pieces to fit to the frames as labelled, matching up the tabs on the skin with the shaded tabs on the keel.

It might be helpful to glue the tabs a few at a time, using clothes pegs to hold them in place.

16. You’ll find some other small rounded tabs on the uprights stations fixed to the keel. Use these to glue or tape the skin to the frame, and keel. Repeat for the other side. And that’s it!

Have a go and send us your photos of your finished boats; especially decorated, colourful and floating ones! We’ll post them up here as they come in.

Fishing under sail and government legislation: UPDATE

A quick update regarding the situation with government legislation and fishing under sail. I’ve just had a very interesting and informative conversation with Nick Wright, the District Marine Officer for the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) in Plymouth. I explained our situation to him and our plans, and he made the following points:

1. Currently all commercial fishing vessels are required to have a licence AND to be registered as fishing vessels. This two part process is jointly managed and authorised by the RSS (Registry of Shipping and Seamen) in Cardiff– an MCA agency – and by the MMO.

2. However, current legislation does not allow licences to be issued to under 10 metre unpowered boats. In view of this, vessels with NO POWER UNITS on board are currently not required to hold a licence or to be registered and may proceed with commercial fishing. (Conversely, vessels with any engine on board – whether in use or not – are required to be registered and licensed).

3. Despite this, current legislation is set to change ‘in the fairly near future’ so that ALL VESSELS including the above exception will have to have a licence and be registered.

Mr Wright advised me to put our plans in writing to him at the MMO, in order to formally register an expression of commitment to such an activity or business. It sounds as though there is some possibility that as and when the legislation changes preferential consideration may be given to those parties who have already declared an interest. This could come in the form of licence entitlement but there is no decision or information about this as yet. By all accounts, an announcement will be made imminently about the planned changes. In the meantime, I’m off to write an email. Many thanks to Nick Wright for his time and advice.

Making a half model

Some of you might have seen my excited tweet about our half model last week when Si emailed me a picture over from Fibrefusion, the profile cutting company run by Steve Neal in Falmouth. Earlier that day Simon took over a memory stick containing his design for our boat, and Steve very kindly agreed to let him record the process of turning several large pieces of glued together MDF into an exact scale replica of Si’s design. Si also took a couple of videos, so I’ll try to get those up here in due course. In the meantime, here’s how to make a half model using a massively cool robotic three dimensional power chisel. You may want to try this at home.

Sadly, although the process of making a half model this way is somewhat akin to magic, it is not just a matter of inputting a file into the cutting machine and pressing go. The machine – a three axis router –  works from its own cutting software.

So before starting the cut, Steve had quite a bit of work to import Si’s design into the software and get it to the stage of being ready to cut. To over simplify what is in reality a complex process, it’s a case of giving the router a series of intricate directions that make up its cutting path, which in turn produces a physical replica of the original CAD drawing.

It’s also a question of working out how best to cut the shape out given the material and the cutting tools available. We used MDF, as it’s cheap, stable and readily available, but you could use an old toilet roll or some pipe cleaners if you like.

Once that was done, Steve set up the router to cut by selecting the appropriate tools and calibrating it. The sheets of MDF were then glued together to the required thickness for the eventual model, and placed on the bed of the router. The machine has a powerful vacuum which holds the materials being used in place during cutting to ensure accuracy.

The router then performs a series of cuts, each one more accurate than the last.

The first cut is a very coarse one, which produced a rough shape of the hull for us and discarded much of the redundant material.

As you can see, even by the end of the first cut the shape of our boat was beginning to emerge.

The machine then performs a second cut using a different tool. This produced a close likeness of the computer model and left the hull ready to be faired.

Finally the machine uses a third tool to sharpen any edges that the rounded second tool can’t make square, and to hone the final shape.

And that’s it, a finished model! Si gave it a quick light sand, but apart from that it came off the machine completely smooth and perfect. So here’s one we made earlier…

Including the time taken to set up the machine, change tools and make small adjustments during the cut, the whole process took less than three hours. It’s pretty incredible.

We’re both absolutely delighted with the half model, and incredibly grateful to Steve at Fibrefusion for all his patience, time and effort.  We now have a tangible representation of what is to come and a solid and sturdy scale version of our boat. Which is exactly how we like our models.

Latest Millican update

Our friends at Millican have just published the latest update from us on their blog! We’ll be writing a series of posts for them this year, keeping track of our progress with Teach a Man to Fish. You can read our first one here.

Photo courtesy of Millican

Fishing under Sail

I found out about the early day motion mentioning Classic Boat’s Eco Fishing Boat Design Competition while I was looking around to find out more about other people fishing under sail. The St Ives Jumbo Association is an organisation devoted to the revival of the small wooden lug rigged beach boats that used to work out of St Ives, called Jumbos, and their website was one of the first I visited. Local boatbuilder Johnny Nance has been instrumental in using old documentation, pictures and sketches to build two new Jumbos, and in fact the Jumbo was featured in the original brief for the Classic Boat design competition. The first, Celeste, was launched in 2007 and was followed in 2010 by William Paynter. The page on the Association’s website dedicated to fishing under sail goes some way to explaining the difficulties facing those trying to fish commercially from an unpowered boat, and provides excellent links to reactions from MPs, including the early day motion. You can find more information here.  We’ve been trying to get in contact with the Association with a view to sharing our progress, given that we’ll be aiming to achieve the same outcome from what are in essence very similar boats.

Fish for the Future is another project I came across; a cruising catamaran refitted as a fishing boat and operating under sail from Devon by John Pedersen. It was very helpful to read about his experiences of dealing with licensing and MCA (Maritime and Coastguard Agency) inspections on his page about commercial fishing under sail and the law. I have since gathered from his latest blog post that he has decided to stop fishing, on the basis that he was simply not catching enough fish. This was mainly due to the need for a crew member at all times and the restrictions of operating solely under sail, mainly due to reduced manoeuvrability. We really hope that by designing a smaller boat that can operate under sail and oar we should be able to embrace more fishing techniques and still be able to manoeuvre efficiently.

We’ve also come across Revival of Working Sail Ltd, a non-profit making company based in Cornwall and aiming to restore and use traditional sailing working vessels.  In addition, and very encouragingly, we’ve been contacted by a Looe based fisherman who fishes under sail on a Yealm crabber.

Finally, there is the Falmouth oyster fishery. Every year between October and April, several boats work around the Carrick Roads under sail and oar to harvest the native wild oysters that are protected by law. The boats are a mixture of tow punts which work under oar, and larger gaff rigged boat which work under sail. Due to laws made in the mid-nineteenth century to protect the oyster beds from over-fishing, the oyster boats are obliged to keep to this season and unpowered method of fishing. Of course, the inefficiency of fishing under sail rather than under power assures limited dredging, which in turn assures the survival of the oyster stocks. As a result, these laws have provided for the conservation of the wild Fal oysters for centuries, and allowed the survival of the last working sailing fishing fleet in Europe. You can find out more about Falmouth oysters and oyster boats from the Falmouth Oyster Festival, Cornish Native Oysters and Cornish Shellfish.

There are also other people out there who are using sail power to propel their boats, even if not as a primary source of propulsion. Powered fishing boats have continued to use mizzens (a small sail at the back of the boat) as a means of stabilising long after the end of the era of sail. However, there are also a few commercial fishing boats looking at using sails to reduce fuel costs, especially on downwind legs of trips to or from fishing grounds, including our friends at Filmer’s Fish. It was also interesting to see an article in this week’s Fishing News talking about using kite type sails on powered commercial fishing boats and other power boats up to 65ft.

The kites mentioned in the article are being manufactured by a French company Omega Sails. A similar method has also been used by Skysails who supply large kites deployed at an altitude of several hundred feet from cargo ships. The fuel saving calculations offered by these companies are fairly staggering.  Skysails suggests that in optimal conditions, fuel consumption can be halved. It’ll be interesting to see how these develop in the future.

Classic Boat Design Competition 2010

In November 2009 Classic Boat magazine launched a competition to design an inshore fishing boat under 10m using only sail or oars, with a deadline of 28th February 2010. The brief encouraged the incorporation of targeting sustainable fishing methods into the design, and it caught our attention. You can read it here: Classic Boat Design Competition Brief

Unfortunately (or not!), in November 2009 Simon and I were in the middle of France, making our way through the canal system to the Med on our boat Planet. It wasn’t until about two weeks before the deadline, when Simon’s parents came to see us bearing gifts of sailing magazines that we found out about the competition at all. Si debated whether to enter or not, but decided that even with minimal time and resources for research (dial-up speed internet at 5 euros an hour being all that was available where we were by then) it was worth a try.

It might seem a bit of an obvious progression now, but at the time we weren’t thinking of any connection between this and what we’d do when we got home. Si managed by the skin of his teeth to get a design sent off by the deadline, resolved to go back  and make several changes he had not had time to incorporate at a later date and we thought little more about it, knowing that it would be another few months before results were published. We were more concerned with getting from Marseille to Greece in that time, so any design work got shelved for the time being as we spent most of our time sailing. It wasn’t until we got a phone call from a friend while we were anchored in a lovely bay in the Northern Sporades sometime in the June or July of 2010 that we found out that Simon had been given joint third place. You can read the results in Classic Boat‘s July 2010 edition.

The feedback Si got from the competition judges was mixed, but ultimately encouraging, and has been very useful when revising the design more recently. When Simon sat down to design our fishing boat a couple of months ago, his sketches and the brief from Classic Boat were obvious places to start. The judges’ principal criticisms of Si’s design and any subsequent changes or comments he has made are as follows:

1. The amidships sections are too round. Fair comment. Si has since adjusted these to provide better initial stability and flatter mid sections.

2. The sheer is too straight. Traditional Cornish boats have always tended to be relatively flat sheered for reasons of economy and because of building constraints. Lines plans of old designs confirm this. Si has kept this in his latest design for both aesthetic and practical reasons.

3. The bilge keels are too deep. Simon’s design is no longer bilge keeled; despite being a practical keel profile for a beach boat, it is less appropriate for fishing as from what we have gathered bilge keels have a tendency to snag fish when handlining. Furthermore, they are a more costly option to build.

4. A self-draining working deck is unrealistic given the design submitted. Also fair comment. Latest design does not specify a self-draining working area in any case as the overall length has been reduced and this is no longer practical or necessary.

5. The main mast is too far forward. The main mast would be too far forward if it was going to be built out of a solid spar. However, Si is planning to use hollow spars and has filled out the forward waterlines so the weight distribution will work well with this arrangement.

Simon is confident that the majority of issues raised are either no longer relevant or have since been resolved, and in any case the design is taking on more of its own direction the more we find out about the parameters within which we’ll be working.

The eventual winner of the competition, James Wharram, is actually based near us at Devoran and has been a successful yacht designer for over fifty years. We were delighted to find the other day that he has now launched the first example of his winning design, Amatasi 27. She is a 27ft sprit rigged catamaran yawl based on the traditional canoe boats found in the Pacific.  Amatasi is designed to be built either in ply and epoxy, or in timber planking. From the sounds of things there is quite a bit of interest in the design already, and we hope this continues to go well.

The Classic Boat Eco Fishing Boat Design Competition also led to various MPs proposing an early day motion praising the magazine for launching the competition. An early day motion (for those who like me had no idea what this was when they first read about it) is a formal motion that is submitted for debate in the House of Commons. Very few are ever actually debated, but  individual MPs can sign these motions to pledge their support and raise awareness of an issue. Basically, as far as I can tell, they are the ‘like’ button on Facebook or the car windscreen sticker equivalent of the world of Parliament. More about this and fishing under sail and oar in the next post…

Roseland Online updates

Happy New Year to you all! A bit of news about a bit more news…. Our local online magazine Roseland Online will be publishing an update from us every month this year. We’ll keep readers informed about the project with photos and a summary of our progress each month. You can read our January update here!

 

A spot of light reading….

Well with a bit of a broken laptop things have been quite slow here on the design front, but this has given us plenty of time to do some more reading and research. We paid a visit to Steve Neal at Fibrefusion last week to discuss profile cutting our design, and he was able to show us the capabilities of his machines and therefore the parameters within which Si’s design needs to work. Not only this, but we had the chance to catch up with Steve’s progress on his 18ft racing gaff cutter Daisy May and to fuss his black labrador. And best of all, Steve has very kindly lent us a computer to work with while we repair or replace the laptop Si usually designs on, which has refused to switch on since one fatal evening two weeks ago when I packed it away into its bag in a fit of tidiness. Moral of the story….

We’ve also been trying to find out more about fishing under sail. This has had some really interesting results, but I’ll talk about it separately as it deserves a post to itself.

The weather in the last few days has been quite extreme, so in many ways the fact that we haven’t started building our boat yet is not the end of the world. I’m sure we would have come up with our fair share of problems by now if we had. All the same, after two years living on Planet, it comes as a surprise to wake up in the middle of the night during a gale and not put our heads outside to check the lines.

Another change to our lives comes in the form of our reading habits, which have become rather more fishing than fiction. Our bedside tables are now both stacked with fishing cookbooks, local history books, boat construction books, catering supplies catalogues, memoirs of the Cornish fishing industry and my personal weekly favourite Fishing News. I feel I am becoming quite discerning about the centre page spread featuring ‘Boat of the Week’… With this in mind, I’ve set up another page for our blog called ‘Links’ where there are references for books and articles we’ve been using, as well as links to useful websites. Let us know if you have any recommendations.

Introduction to Fishmongering

Despite a 4.30am start which made me question the point of going to bed the night before at all, we had an excellent day today attending our second fishing industry training course run by Seafood Cornwall Training, in association with Seafish. Today’s course was the ‘Introduction to Fishmongering’ course, and we had a really interesting and informative day. Thank you very much to everyone!

We started off at 6.30am with a tour of Newlyn market and harbour by Andy Wheeler of the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation. This was fascinating as we had a chance to look round the market while the buyers were there, with Andy explaining the process to us as we went round. Although the weather’s been poor recently, a couple of beam trawlers had landed in time for market, and there were several boxes ready to be sold. It was predominantly monkfish but there was also a large quantity of cuttlefish, as well as some squid, ray, hake, megrim and whiting amongst others. Once the market finished, despite being well before 9am it felt as though it was about lunchtime, so we all gratefully retreated to the Fishermen’s Mission for a bacon sandwich.

After breakfast we headed off to the harbour where Andy was able to give us some insight into the fishing methods and grounds of many of the boats in the harbour. It was particularly interesting to see a small ring netter used to fish for Cornish sardines (the artist formerly known as pilchards). Despite using traditional methods, the boat’s layout had been designed for purpose with modern efficient equipment to allow sustainable fishing without the same effort and workforce historically required for pilchard fishing.

There were some really interesting people with us on our course. Kevin Penney fishes from Newlyn on his 21ft boat Bess. We were able to have a look at Bess during our harbour tour and she’s a great boat.  It was invaluable to talk to Kevin about his boat and fishing, given that he is already catching line caught fish using sustainable methods from an under ten metre boat. You can follow Kevin on Twitter at @kevin_penney or via the South West Handline Fishermen Assocation (Tag no. 101).

We also met Lynda Filmer, who fishes with her husband from Helford on their catamaran Emily Jane. They fish mainly using static nets, taking care to catch their fish and shellfish as sustainably as possible, avoiding bycatch and unnecessary environmental impact. They also have a sailing rig on their boat in order to economise on fuel when conditions allow. I was delighted to meet someone who’s already fishing as part of a husband and wife team, and you can have a look at their website here.

Finally, we had a chance to catch up with Charlotte Taffinder, who runs a farm shop from Curgurrell Farm just a few miles from us in Portscatho.  Her family have two under ten metre fishing boats that supply the shop with fish and are the only remaining commercial fishing boats working from Portscatho. It was great to exchange notes about our thoughts and plans.

The remainder of the day was devoted to learning some of the skills required of a fishmonger, building on what we’d learned in our filleting course at Cornwall College. This was led by Annie Sibert, who also runs her own seafood school My Fish Kitchen in Mawnan Smith, and who taught our fantastic fish filleting course two weeks ago.

We spent some time discussing our businesses and talking about the issues relevant to running a fish shop such as quality awareness, marketing and presentation. Finally, we watched Annie start to put together an arrangement of fish for a shop counter, and finished the day by completing the display ourselves as a group. There was a lot to think about today; ideas I would never have considered and first-rate advice from experts in the industry, and we drove home utterly wired on coffee and four hours’ sleep.

The Rules: registration, licensing and quotas

I mentioned in our introduction that current legislation permits unpowered (i.e. propelled by sail and/or oar only) vessels under 10m in length to fish without a licence, and therefore without a quota. However, having both spent the last few months talking to people and researching the regulations, it seems that there is a fair amount of dissent and confusion about the situation. I’m going to try to work out why, and to get a definitive answer and explanation of the situation. If anyone has any more information we would love to hear from you.

As far as I understand it, ordinarily a new fishing boat has to go through the following process before it can legally be used to catch and land fish commercially:

1. Register the vessel

2. Obtain a licence entitlement

3. License the vessel

4. Adhere to the conditions of the licence by fishing under relevant quota

5. Register as a seller of first sale fish

6. Sell fish to registered buyers

The Marine Management Organisation (MMO: the government body responsible for fisheries legislation) gives details of the above. Seafish also has some helpful information here.

Firstly, the MMO clearly states here that Step 1 is unnecessary for unpowered sub 10 metre boats:

“Before obtaining a fishing vessel licence, your vessel must be registered with the Registry of Shipping and Seamen (RSS). This applies unless the vessel:
• is a salmon coble;
• has an overall length of 10 metres and under and is not propelled by an engine (for example the vessel only has oars or a sail);
• has an overall length of 10 metres and under and will only be used to fish for common eels.”

The MMO’s guidance leaflet “Fishing Vessel Licensing – An Introduction” clearly states that Steps 2, 3 and therefore 4 are also unnecessary, as shown in this flowchart: Fishing Vessel Licensing – An introduction flowchart

So far so good. No registration, no licence, no quota. But can you legally sell the fish you catch? According to the 2005 Registration of Fish Buyers and Sellers and Designation of Fish Auction Sites legislation,  you need to register as a seller only if you operate as a trader at a designated auction site. We won’t be doing that, so this means Step 5 is no problem.

Finally, Step 6. The MMO explains in its guidance notes that buyers do not need to be registered if the fish is for private consumption and under a daily maximum of 25kg. So, restaurants and pubs would need to be registered buyers to legally buy from us, but this is standard for their industry in any case.

Finding all this was a mission of research and frustration if ever there was one. Many government bodies, countless advisory websites, representative groups and several quangos later, I managed to dredge up the necessary information. I will say this. The government websites are rubbish; hard to navigate, often hard to find in the first place and full of frequently out of date information. It’s like someone’s taken the laws of fishing, shredded them into bits and then distributed those bits to a number of close friends with whom they have since lost touch. Parliament, if I tell six of my mates that I am doing a sponsored silence, ask them to put up posters and spread the word, then spend the next months and years changing the date, making small get-out clauses and rescheduling at the last minute, it is not the same as actually doing it. I am still talking.

Now to get all of the above (possibly not the last paragraph) on a piece of paper, acknowledged and signed by somebody in authority to do so. Should be easy…..

Designing our boat: how it works

Si’s now almost at a stage in his boat design where he can start to make a scale model of our boat and use this to assess the shape and fairness of the computer model of the boat that he has been working with up until now. Once this is done, we can start building! So I thought it might be interesting to talk about what Si’s done so far and why, and what is still to come before we start on the build.

I sat down to write about the design and realised that for all the time I’ve spent sitting next to Si while he’s been drawing and designing, I actually had very little idea of the specifics steps of designing a boat. So I made Si sit down and take me through the process of design from the first little lightbulb moment to the swanky roll of paper at the end with borders and numbers and names and ‘build me’ written all over it. This is a condensed version of our conversation:

1. You get the brief, or the idea. You sit down and scribble down anything that comes to mind. Your take on the concept and your initial idea of how the boat will look, how long it will be, what it will be made of, what kind of rig it will have.

2. You do a parametric study of other boats within a broadly similar category. This allows you to specify the design criteria and constraints, and is a massively good excuse for wandering around boatyards and perusing boat magazines.

3. With this information, you go back to your original sketches and start to revise them. You outline the features you want your boat to have, its general dimensions, and you make initial decisions on things like hull materials, rig, sail area and weight.

4. Once you’ve done this, you produce a model. In the past, boat builders would always produce a half model of the boat, by carving a lump of wood into a scale version of half the hull. Some boat builders still do this, but in general nowadays the process happens on a computer screen using three dimensional modelling software.

5. With a first draft of your design on the computer, you run through a series of checks and calculations to tweak your design and ensure that it fulfills the aims stipulated on the brief. Inevitably, changing one element of the design has a knock-on effect on all the other elements, so you go round in series of cycles, adjusting and honing everything until you arrive at your final design. This process includes everything from calculating the boat’s stability, working out how to make your design comply with regulations and coding, to adjusting the length to fit the location the boat will be used in, and deciding on what colour you’re going to paint the seats. Si is nearing the end of this process right now. All in all, the process looks something like this (except hopefully less wonky):

6. Once everything has been accounted for and checked, and you are happy with your final design, you produce a solid half model of the boat, cut from either foam or timber. This gives you the chance to show a customer a tangible representation of their boat, and allows you to appraise the shape and fairness before committing to building your boat. In the past, at this stage, the boat builder would have finished shaping and carving the original half model based on the decisions made in the previous step. The easiest way to get a half model cut these days is by sending digital files of the design to a cutting company, who will be able to use a three axis router to automatically cut the shape directly from your design.

7. What you do next depends on the hull material and method of building. Si’s decided to build our boat out of strip planking which will then be epoxy sheathed. So with this method, having cut your half model, and made any necessary adjustments, you start on the process of making the design into a plywood kit to build with. By doing this, you produce a design that can be built quite quickly and cheaply as a one-off boat, but with a design that can be digitally cut and replicated any number of times.

8. The plywood kit will form the skeleton of the boat, over which we will fasten the planking. Si will convert his digital design into a series of pieces that can be individually cut and put together. The file he produces will look something like a flat packed pop-out kit for making a toy model with. Think Airfix. Before sending the file to be cut at full scale, Si will make a tenth scale model out of card or thin plywood to check that all the pieces of this skeleton fit together as they should. This also gives you a good idea of how the build itself will work, and is a last minute chance to make any changes. Once this is done, you send the file off, get the pieces cut at full scale, and start building!