Steve’s Boat Building An amateur’s attempt to build a strip plank dinghy

My bow clamp

This is a fairly simple home-made camp to hold the planks against the bow until the epoxy hardens. Tightening the two black knobs drives the two pads, which are free to rotate, against the planks.


Clean-up


The most tedious part of this process is cleaning off the excess epoxy once all the clamps and wedges are in place. I use cleaning cloths which are probably paper, but very tough, to clean along the outside of each joint as I fix the clamps and wedges. The kitchen cloths come in rolls of 50 for a pound from the Pound Shop. I find them a bit harder than the equivalent bought from a supermarket, and this seems to make them more effective. When the strip is firmly positioned, I found that a very cheap stainless steel filler blade from Lidl runs easily along the inside of the joint, and lifts off the majority of the excess epoxy. I then use small rectangles of scouring pad to give a final clean to both inside and out. Again, the souring pads come from the Pound Shop at £1 for ten. These I cut into four pieces, and then bend the small rectangles in half, and use one face of the pad for each section of the joint. By reversing the fold, I end up with 160 cleaning surfaces for a pound. Unfortunately, with 13 formers, there are 56 joint sections per plank, so this is not quite as economical as I would wish, but the end result is worth both cost and effort.

Don’t forget to look at the slowly growing time-lapse clip of the build.