 Unlikelyboatbuilder writes:
Builder's Blog: The Unlikely Boat Builder
An account of an unhandy man's quest to build a small wooden sailing boat.
21 October 2009
Building the Bones
Like supermodels, boats are mainly skin and bones, with some extra bits for added interest. Big boats, like models and dinosaurs, carry their bones around inside them for strength and to help them keep their shape.
But small boats shed most of their bones before birth to save weight, retaining just enough of them to maintain their shape. It's a bit like a snake shedding it's skin, only in this case, it's the skin -- the bottom and sides of the boat -- that we're after.
 To build those soon-to-be-shed bones, I needed to build Cabin Boy's four molds. A mold is something like the rib of an Apatosaurus. The boat's skin (planking) is bent around the molds. When the planking is secured and reinforced, the molds are removed. It seemed a bit more complicated than that, but that was the basic idea, I thought.
Read the complete blog entry
| 
