Gluing the deck onto the Piney (hollow wood surfboard)

Happy Friday everyone!

Ah the sweet anticipation of tasting the first homebrew of a batch!  As I am writing this a Bleeding Gums Murphy is chilling in the fridge!  It's only been ten days and probably isn't carbonated yet, but ya gotta just try don't ya?  The only problem is that it takes forever to chill!

Today I managed to glue the deck onto the Piney.  First I tried to use straps to clamp it down and the curvature of the rails created huge cracks in the planks.  Oops!  Now I know what I have to do to use that method, but I couldn't use it this time so I went to the tried and true method of clamping battens or strapping across the board.  With all of the adjustments in clamps and clamping and gluing up the cracked planks the process took me twice as long as I had hoped.  To use the strap clamps, which still might prove to be a good method, the deck will have to be shaped almost exactly to size so that it does not overlap the rails very far and over-bend them.  Since it took so long to clamp up I am glad that I used slow cure 5200 to glue it.  On the downside it takes that stuff at least 3 days to cure which means I have to wait and I am very impatient at this stage!  But I can focus on varnishing the canoe for the next three days and finishing up that project which will be an incredible feeling!  It looks awesome!

So, here are some pics:

Here is the Piney ready to be fitted with it's deck.  If you look real hard you can see shims along the cross frames to fill in some gaps.

**NOTE TO SELF**  Tack these on so they don't slide off when adjusting the deck!

With this pic you can see how I planed down the top surface of the rails flat and did some initial shaping of the rails which I tried to describe in my last post.  This is a better picture of that.  The tops of all of these frames will be covered in a bead of 5200 and the rails will be painted with Titebond III.  I could probably get away with caulking the rails as well, but this time I ran out of caulk anyway.  I am sure either way would be OK.

My uncle and I cut out the overall shape of the board beforehand and last night I glued on some pegs along the keel to create another keyway to center the deck on the board.  That worked out pretty well.  Now, if I wanted to use the strap clamps this deck cut out would be narrower and cut almost exactly how it would fit on the board.  This one is oversized by about two inches along either rail and those two inches will be planed off.

Multitudes of clamps!  I used every clamp in the shop today!  I had to make use of the clamps that I had the nose and tail blocks clamped up with.  I would have left them on for another day, but after unclamping, they were well dry and almost fully cured.  No movement in the the nose bands.  Cool!  The bar clamps going across the board are pulling the cracks tight together.  They wont be noticeable anyway as they are going to be part of the rail that is planed off but to keep them from spreading further, they had to be clamped and glued as well.  Here and there wedges had to be shoved in there.  Mostly along the keel line as the strapping tends to bend upward in the center not putting enough pressure on the deck there.

Oh that familiar sound of wood cracking!  It's as loud as a M-80 and enough to scare the begeesus out of you.

 {{Soggy Bottom Boys, Man of Constant Sorrow on WXPN}}

All in all, I lost 5 of these battens.  It's always good to go and check on things every few hours to make sure that you haven't lost any more.

Rough hewn nose and tail blocks.  They are looking pretty good, but will look incredible once in place and shaped!

I still have over an hour before that beer is chilled!   YARR!