Picked up the LVL stringer material and the special 1 1/8 flooring plywood that will be used for the front 16' of the shelves (Gunnels). The LVL beam is 14” X 1 3/4" X 20’ long and man is that beam heavy. It must weigh at least 100 lbs. My local lumber yard had a huge assortment of sizes right in stock, including the size I needed. The plywood was a different matter. One lumber yard said they never heard of it. They called their supplier and HE said he never heard of it either – great. Off to another place – had better luck there. That’s one thick sheet of plywood.

When I cut out the LVL stringer I almost screwed it up. I was so careful to measure and mark it to make *sure* I cut it perfectly in the middle and almost did, till I realized that cutting at a 12 degree angle on a line that is exactly in the middle will actually yield two different size beams! Recalculated so the blade would cut the middle of the beam ‘at the center” and made the cut. It was slow going with my standard duty Porter Cable saw, but having a brand new Porter Cable blade helped a lot. There’s nothing like high quality equipment and that includes blades and sandpaper.

I used a Skiffkits template to mark the curve at the front of the LVL stringers and again it worked out great. To trim the beam at the changing angle to match the curve of the bow I first marked off each section which would have a different angle, then wrote right on the beam the correct angle for each section. Starting at the tip I set a small adjustable ‘anglefinder’ to the correct angle for that section, then started planing using my power planer staying roughly within the lines for that section. When I started to get close to the correct angle, I’d check the angle that I’d set on the anglefinder in a couple of places. When it was about right (the right angle AND just about all the way across the beam at that angle) I’d move to the next section and repeat. Once all the sections were done, I planed just a bit more to even the angle transition between sections. It sounds like a lot of work but I think both stringers only took about 30 minutes or so and the curves look great. One other thing: As noted by others, its obvious that there is some sort of coating on the LVL beam. To get the coating off I used my wonderful carbide scraper - scraping at a 45 degree angle across the beam to scrape the vast majority of the waxy 'gunk' off. I finished up with a light sanding using my disk sander and 20 grit paper.

I used the Skiffkits patterns to trace and cut out the front two shelf pieces using my good saber saw. Used the first pieces to make mirror image duplicates and there we are – I just had to watch out that the 21 degree angle was on the correct side of the shelf! Cutting the 2X8 to make the rear shelf pieces was pretty easy and something like cutting the LVL in half – making sure to really cut it in half. I ran the 12’ rear shelf pieces through my big planer to get them down to the required 1 1/8" but had a problem. My woodworking shop normally only allows for a 10’ long piece of stock in and out of the planer and this is longer than that. Back when I had planned the shop I had allowed for this problem, but this is the first time I actually had to deal with it. So I opened the front doors of the shop (second floor above my garage) and a rear window and viola! Now I can plane greater than 10’ stock.

Test fitting the shelves to the build frame brought a bit of concern – they don’t seem to line up right! It seemed I had too much curve in the middle parts of the shelves so the rear parts didn’t really line up - it was almost like they curved too far. As it turned out, what I had to do was really set things up with the bowstem and the shelves held in the right location relative to station 6, then everything seemed to fall into place. Plus, the rear shelf pieces are slightly narrower than the others – once I realized that and put everything together the way it really would end up it worked out right allowing everything to line up correctly.

Gluing up the shelf joints was MUCH more trouble than it should have been and it was all my fault. Renn says to do it on a wooden surface so you can screw the shelves right down and clamp them easily. I thought I'd just do it right on top of my build frame, but the spaces between cross pieces in the frame allowed things to flop around and it was hard to hold everything just right. I finally ended up with the front parts of the shelves clamped to the cross piece at station 3 (frontmost) and pieces of 3/4 plywood screwed to the bottom of the joints with visqueen (plastic sheeting) in between so that the 3/4 plywood wouldn't become a permanent part of the boat. I also put 2 - 2.5" screws across each joint - one from each side to ensure the joints were pulled together well. The gluing consisted of painting unthickened epoxy onto all the joints and letting it set for about 15 minutes to soak in. Then I applied epoxy thickened with a lot of milled glass for maximum strength and a little wood flour for final thickness adjustment. On top of that I put two layers of 10 oz glass. This is more than Renn specs out but its very easy and won't show because this is on the underside. The shelves are an important structural part of the boat - I doubt there can be too much strength here.

Fitting the bowstem to the front of the shelves proved to be a relatively easy task. I was expecting some difficulty, but using the published "Beddoe Bow" specs for the stem along with the angles already in the book proved to work perfectly.