Shenandoah Whitehall: Frames and Stringers

     The first step in this project is to cut the transverse sections, or frames, out of plywood.  I imagine that you could probably get away with using exterior-grade stuff from Home Depot, if you slathered it with enough polyurethane, but marine-grade plywood is definitely the recommended material for this.  There are a couple of reasons for this-- the obvious one is that marine plywood will resist moisture better, but it's also desirable to have quality plywood with no voids.  The design calls for driving screws into the end-grain of the  plywood, and a void in the wrong place could allow the screws to pull right out.  A high quality marine plywood such as Okoume is ideal.

Voids are bad.

     While we had decided that we were going to do the thing properly and buy the good plywood, we found (or didn't find, really) that marine plywood can be a little hard to get your hands on.  We weren't about to pay $200 to ship a single sheet of plywood, and in the end we had to drive all the way to Chesapeake Light Craft in Annapolis to find someone who could sell us half a sheet (not pictured).

Somehow this job managed to tie up three pairs of hands: one to hold the vacuum,
one to hold a light, and one to do the actual cutting.  We needed the light because
we didn't have a fourth guy to help us change the bulb overhead.

     Once we had the material, cutting out the frames was easy.  Gentry's plan comes with full size patterns for all the frames, so all we had to do was glue the paper to the plywood (we used a spray-on adhesive from Lowe's) and cut along the lines.  A jigsaw will cut through both paper and the plywood without any trouble.  Cutting out all the little notches is a little tedious, but not difficult.  NB: If left on for too long (several days), the adhesive can damage the face of the plywood.  It's easy to sand out, but better to just label each piece with a pencil and remove the paper as soon as you're done cutting.

     The pieces that run the length of the boat, called stringers, were up next.  We cut ours out of Western Red Cedar, which is flexible, resists rot, and is very lightweight.  They need to be quite thin, so they must be completely free of knots.  They also need to be quite long, which can be bit of problem -- our shop doesn't have the 29 feet we would need to run 14 foot planks through the table saw.  Rather than hauling the table saw out of the basement (ugh!), we tilted it by setting two of its legs up on a 4x4.  This gave us a little extra height, so we could make use of crawlspace as well.  It made me a little nervous -- Grandpa lost a finger to a table saw, and I don't like doing anything with one that might produce unpredictable results -- but we didn't proceed until we were certain it was completely stable.  Nobody lost any fingers, so I guess it was an OK idea.

Madness, I tell you!  Madness!

I know this picture is a little crooked.  But remember,
the table saw is crooked, too.

     Because of the length of these pieces, we decide to clamp a featherboard to the table saw.   It worked pretty well.  Besides holding the stock tightly against the fence, it can (in theory) prevent kickback, so it's not a bad idea to use one.  Ours was made out of a piece of hickory left over from a kitchen remodel, but you could probably use anything.  Making one yourself is pretty much self-explanatory.






     We ended up needing three 1x6's to for the necessary stringers.  (Actually one was a 1x8, but we only bought it because it was what the lumber yard had.  We ended up with leftover material.)

So far as we can tell, we're finished with the most tedious part . . .