After reading what other people had gone through trying to get the reverse curve in the bottom bow plank, I had been dreading it.
We came at it slowly, with lots of dry fittings, and slowly pulled it into shape. It got glued on with at least a dozen temporary screws in it, some stiches and a pile of clamps.
It sounded like a few wood fibers had broken, but we weren't too worried until we looked at the curve after the clamps where out the way. It's suppose to have a reverse curve, but it looks too extreme.
What really concerns us, is as the plywood comes around bulkhead one going aft it bulges, and then curves back in before bulkhead two. The straight edge in the photo helps show what I mean - the arrow points to where it dips back in.
We don't know if this is just how the Nav's lines are drawn, and if this is normal. Or if it's a problem with how this one's gone on.
It looks all a bit messy in here at the moment, but we glued these blocks on to give us a solid anchorage to screw into when we fitted the plank.
It was when we started putting the second side on that we ran into serious problems. Although we were screwing into the stem, and had some clamps going to temporary battens, we obviously had too many clamps straight on the stringer because it started tearing the stem apart. The ply delaminated on at least three different layers.
We repaired that by running epoxy in, and bolting it together.
After that had several days to harden up, we had another go. This time despite using screws with large timber pads, we tore the plywood.
We've been left a little bit disillusioned at the moment, and trying to sort out our options.
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