Building the frames

Building a 22 1/2 foot classic cruiser.

Home Which boat? Where to start? Building the frames Building the stem Setting up Longitudinal members Fairing Planking Painting Righting the hull Trailer Engine

 

 

We never did get a chance to test out all the new tools on junk lumber. With May all ready half gone, we decided to proceed and jump right into the $6/board-foot vertical grain Honduras Mahogany. After tracing the lines from the patters to the lumber for the first frame, we noticed there'd be lots of wasted lumber unless we found a way to optimize it. But how?

I raided Teri's supply of heavy duty craft paper and build all 8 frames in paper. Each frame actually had 5 pieces - two identical sides, two identical bottoms, and one floor timber. We then laid out side by side in the basement all 150 sq-ft of lumber. After about 4 hours, we had optimized the placement of all the "paper frames." After all 8 frames were built, we had used only about 75% of the lumber the plans called for and our waste was very thin/short pieces of lumber. Here's us working on some frames - you see the paper frames scattered around, and here's Teri working on the transom:


 

We only had enough room to build one frame at a time. The building station is two pieces of 3/4 CDX perfectly leveled on the floor. On top of that was two pieces of 1/2 CDX that had the frames traced on and used as the setup jig. Each frame took Saturday morning and afternoon to cut the 5 pieces of lumber and the four plywood gussets. Saturday night we glued them up, then Sunday morning we turned them over and glued on the two other plywood gussets and the over-kill lumber filler blocks.