Keel progress & chine prep

It's the end of September, and fallen leaves are slowly beginning to blanket my yard. I wonder which week will be fall this year. 

Week. That's right.

Fall in Georgia kinda goes like this: Temperature drops on Monday. Colors begin to change on Tuesday. Peak colors on Wednesday. Most of the trees are bare by Thursday. Winter rains start on Friday — and then it's mud until February.

No. It ain't Maine, that's for sure.

I have spent most early mornings this week, slowly trying to flatten out the keel on the starboard side. In the last post, the keel still had something of a "bowl" to it, with the low point at Frame #2, and high points at Frame #4 and the transom:

After a good bit of work, now it looks like this:

There are still a few bumps and waves in it, but it has flattened out a lot.

Today I decided to take a break from the keel, and start preparing the chines. The Zip Bill of Materials calls for 1" x 2", 16-foot long boards for the chines. I am planning to laminate the chines, as I did with the keel, for ease of bending and twisting.

Yesterday, my son and I ripped the last 8-foot mahogany board I had into two 2" strips. Then I ran them across my planer/jointer until they were about 1/2" thick. 

After some thought, I decided to joint the two with a scarf joint. From what I've read, the ideal scarf joint has a ratio of about 1:12. If I did my math correctly, that roughly comes out to about a 5° angle.

I made a very simplistic sled for my table saw by simply cutting a 2x4 at a 5° angle with my mitre saw. I simply clamped the cut piece of 2x4 to the sled that came with the saw.

No, it's not perfect. There's not a way to safely clamp the board I'm cutting to the sled, so I have to simply hold it in position and proceed with extreme caution. With a little more help from my son, who supported the weight of the 8-foot board, the cuts went fairly smoothly.

I haven't yet glued the joint together. Here's the plan:

For the sake of alignment, I'm going to glue the joint while the boards are laying on the floor.... yes, vertically, like in the picture. Why vertically?

I wanted to be able to lock the boards into position, so that the scarf joint didn't slide apart when pressure is applied to the joint. To me, it seemed the easiest thing to to would be to clamp the boards to my construction form, like this:

That's it for now. Let's see what October may bring!