Gunwales, Decks and Stems (oh my!)
Trying to prep and paint the exterior, but decisions have to be made
So last time we got to the point where we could start sanding, fairing, and smoothing the hull exterior in order to paint. This includes finishing and smoothing the stems (the pointy front/back of the boat. Should be a piece of cake.
Yeah right!
Not so fast my friends, we have a bunch of style decisions to make for the boat! The Stem Post, or the top of the stem is basically where all the boat’s style points come together. If it was a viking ship I’d be carving a nice dragon, wham bam thank you ma’am, we are done. Not so fast in this case. You have the stem post, the gunwales, the deck, and the brass hardware all meeting and terminating at/around the same point. So, you better know what you’re doing before you start snipping.
There are a lot of different styles for just about every aspect of a guideboat, far too much to get into. There are 3 main regionally-based styles of guideboat, design characteristics of which can vary from the superficial (The deck sits over or between the gunwales), to the practical (Long Lake style guideboats typically have less rocker and reverse curved ribs for a narrower waterline entry/exit. Long Lake is 14 miles long north-south and has a fairly constant crosswind, requiring better tracking).
I can’t recommend the below book enough, as it does a great job showing you different design considerations, and solutions. This post would more or less be me regurgitating information and pictures from this book, but I assure you dear reader, I enough integrity to only steal one picture from it in this post.
I want to more or less copy Caleb Chase’s design without changing too much, but I do want brass protecting the top of the stem. You can see from a lot of pictures of nonrestored guideboats that they get pretty mangled from out of water use.
So what’s the purpose of this whole exercise? At the end of the day I need to shape the top of my stem to accept a continuation of my brass stem band, and look a little something like Fuat Latif’s solution in the picture below. I’ll get into stem band hardware in a later post.
It’s just not the easiest thing to visualize when your boat currently looks like this:
I would like to have my hull and stem painted before I screw on the cherry gunwales.
ISSUE:
The stem has to be shaped to the final bevel before I install the gunwales
The gunwales need to be done before I mount the deck.
The deck has to be installed before I install the deck cap.
The deck cap has to be installed so I know how to curve the stem post and transition the stem band from the stem post to the deck cap and terminate, as seen in Fuat’s picture.
That all seems very linear, right? Well the stem post needs to be painted, and I don’t know that I can touch up the stem post after the fact and have it look linear with the rest of the hull.
See why I need this blog?
I guess I’ve just convinced myself that I need to wait to paint, and *at most* prime the hull before I screw on the gunwales. I don’t think I’ll be clear to paint until I’ve installed the decks and bent and fitted the stem bands to the boat.
Oh, I will need to install some strips of hard wood, or “shoes” under the bottom board for skid protection, so I will probably pre paint that section first before screw on the shoes, varnish those, and then pop the whole boat off of the strong back for good.
See why I’m procrastinating so much??