Spent some time off on Monday cutting out the chine flats, attaching and gluing to the bottom. This is a pretty straightforward operation and easier than some of the other things that I'd been doing in that the pieces were a lot smaller! Not only that, but I had help tracing the chine flats onto the plywood - my little girl wanted to help Daddy work on the boat!

I did run into one issue that I had to think about a bit before I was able to resolve it: In the book, Renn has you scarf together two pieces of 1/2" stock to make the curved forward chine flat section. This would put the first chine flat butt joint well behind the 1/4 to 1/2 transition. I used the simpler method of making 3 seperate 8' pieces. The forward piece has most of the curve to it, the second piece has just a small amount of the remaining curve and the 3rd piece is straight. The issue is that when using this method, the joint between the forward and 2nd piece falls very close to the scarf joint between the 1/4" and 1/2" bottom pieces. Since the 1/4 bends so much more easily then the 1/2", there is a tendency for the 1/4" to begin to bend almost immediately forward of the scarf. With the chine flat joints so close to this transition, the forward chine flat piece wants to be at the angle of the 1/4 bottom sheet and the 2nd chine flat piece wants to be at the angle of the 1/2 bottom sheet. This causes an abrupt angle change at the chine flat joint which does NOT look good since it interrupts the flowing curved line of the chine.

I fixed this by placing a 2' long piece of 2 X 4 under the chine flat and applying pressure at each end (which forced up the unfair joint in the middle) JUST until the chine had the correctly flowing line. Then I glued it in that position. I had to allow the chine flat to rise a bit above the bottom plywood in the joint area to keep the chine fair. I also used lots of biscuits along the remaining 2/3 of the chine flats to keep good alignment and which worked very well.