Plank laps and just a bit of varnish...

With the setup faired up reasonably well, I made up six battens about 16-17' long to lay out the plank lines.  On a lapstrake boat like Belle, these will show up strongly, so I wanted them to be nice and fair.  Plus I threw a quick coat of thinned varnish on the transom to protect it a bit from spills and hand prints etc.  Western Red Cedar is very soft and soaks up any kind of liquid like a sponge.  I think I'll add a second coat later too, just in case.

I'm really anxious to get planking, especially now that I've "seen" the planks using my battens!  But...sigh...I'd really like to get a couple of more items in place beforehand:  the centerboard case, sheer clamp, and a full-length seat riser about 6" above the waterline.  In theory I could put these into the boat after the boat is planked and flipped right-side-up, but I figured it would be easier to get them in place now.  Someday--sooner rather than later, I hope--I'll finish off the plans and post a copy here.  Then I'll be able to refer readers directly to the plans when I write something like "seat riser about 6" above the waterline".

Once I had the transom shaped on one side, I took it off and cut the other side to match.  To do that I recut the original transom pattern to the new shape.  Shaping pretty much by eye--but using battens to make sure everything looked fair--my "new and I hope improved" transom is slightly fuller than that drawn in my original plans.  I'm keeping the revised transom pattern, which I'll use to update the plans later.

A first coat of varnish really soaks into the Western Red Cedar...actually dry in spots.  A few more coats and this should have a nice glow.  My last boat had WRC thwarts and I thought they looked great.  It is a very soft wood, however, and shows every ding and scratch.

Here I'm tweaking the battens to determine the plank laps.  The battens are 1/2" thick by 1" wide.  My plank laps will be 1" wide--in other words, there will be 1" of overlap between one plank and the next-- so the battens show exactly where each lap will be on the final boat.  Once I was happy with the plank locations, I marked each mold and the stem and transom for each lap.  A sharp eye will tell that the sheer plank--the lowest one in this photo--is slightly wider than the rest.   This is because the final boat will have a half-round to protect the sheer.  I added width to the sheer plank so that it would appear to be the same width as the other planks once the half-round is added.   

A Bosch fan??  I guess so!

The bottom will be made up  of a 3/8"-thick panel and a 1/4"-thick panel epoxied together for a total thickness of 5/8".  The reason I'm not just using 5/8" plywood is I want to bend the plywood to the shape of the transom, and I figure 5/8" would be just too stiff for that. Or at least very difficult.  Dimensions came from the lofting.  The aft end of the panels (the end closest to you in this photo) look to be quite wide, but the aft end of the boat will be heavily shaped once everything is glued up on the boat.

The next steps are:  building the centerboard case (including a pattern for the centerboard) and notching the molds for the sheer clamp and seat riser.  Ripping out said sheer clamps and risers from Douglas fir and installing into the notches, ready (finally!) for planking.