Welcome Nate. I got some board building supplies for christmas as well. feel free to ask anything.

I got a 6'0" fish for chirstmas and am already almost ready to glue the bottom to the frame. I was thinking that a 1/4" thick and 20" wide piece of wood is probably not easy to bend. Do you think that doing the wet towel on top/iron idea would work for the whole front 1/4 of the board?

P.S. I made a blog about my board at http://lifelongslider.blogspot.com/

Roughwake, good question. I know Timmy did it this way on the top deck. I am building the nine footer which has a lot of rocker in the nose and I didn't steam the board at all and it came out fine. The only problem that i can think of with steaming is that it has the possibility to weaken the glue joints. I would say don't steam on the bottom, maybe a little on the top.

Yeah Nate welcome to the forum, glad your building.

The key to those notches is to place them so the 1/4" x 1/4" chine strip will rest flush against the top of the plank surface, and the outside surface will be flush with primary strip (but in other words just clip off what would be the bottom corner. Remember that chine strip will be completely internal and only show up if you sand through during shaping (that's what it's for after all).

You'll be fine just eyballing...I mean do a precise job, but just don't let perfection stop all progress because it all gets faired in the final shaping

PS - May I suggest you start a new thread in the "ongoing projects" thread?

Cool.

So do you square the bottom corners of the frames? In other words, instead of cutting the frames to the actual shape on the plan, you carry the straight line of the bottom out and drop a verticle line down from the outer-most point to form a 90 degree corner instead of a rounded chine. Then making the notches for the chine strip would simply be a matter of cutting out that corner. I was drawing this up this morning, and it looked like this method would provide plenty of substance to then shape the chine to it's specified, rounded shape. I am thinking about this in the right way or have I got it wrong? Thanks in advance.
Nate

That sounds exactly right mate. Plenty enough material for the bottom rail profile for most flatter rail profiles. If you wanted closer to 50/50 then you would need to have a larger guide strip to grind into. Papa Woody did some nice cross section drawings showing the guide strip earlier in this post I think.

I still a little confused how you link the deck planks and the rails. Rich's diagram seems to show the top planks being put over the rail strips. Do you simply glue the top planks to the top rail strips and sand down until it looks like one solid peice. Also if you did it this way wouldn't the curve of the top deck(determined by the ribs) be off by the 1/4 rail strip. Any responces would be appreciated.

Thanks for everything.

Good question. Yes the deck planks are just laid down on top, clamped, and glued, then feathered to "mate" with the rail strips underneath. Remember though, those rail stips are planed (featherd) down beforehand (in some places almost paper-thin). So the end result is that the final profile is not "off."

As the rail strips feather out, the deck planks feather in. No net difference.

get it?

I have found this technique very helpful in the nose, it allows to pull back and push down all at once.

heres how I was doing mine.