Keel

November 2000

The spruce that the planking is made of doesn't have enough density to build the keel from. Also spruce is not strong across the fibers, so you don't want to put a keel bolt through it, we learnt from Tom MacNaughton. So we had to buy some mahogany for the keel and the stem.

The keel and stem is laminated from the mahogany. In this picture you can see me standing on the keel on the upside down hull and get a good measure of how big the boat is. You can also see the clamps that hold the mahogany in the keel together while the epoxy cures. This was a part of the building where we got help from the boatbuilders at the yard.
We enforced the plywood molds with some cheap fir to get a bigger surface for the planks.

The stem is laminated as the keel. In fact I laminated the stem and the keel as one piece even though the plans suggested bolting the pieces together with a knee.

Aft of the stem you can see the permanent bulkhead of the anchor box. There is also a bulkhead dividing the anchor box in the longitudal direction that can't be seen. The notches in the bulkhead are for the clamp/shelf that connects the deck with the planking at the sheer.