Cutting the Backbone - Part One

This past spring and summer has been a quite productive one at the Jefferson Manor Hilltop Boatyard. The same certainly can't be said for this blog, but I take comfort in the knowledge that that has more to do with a lack of time to write than it does with any lack of progress. Though I could have, I also decided not to compose a post about the shaping of each individual backbone component, since that would have resulted in a seemingly endless series of posts about barely distinguishable chunks of wood. Instead, I'm writing just two seemingly endless posts about barely distinguishable chunks of wood, which I'm sure will be far better. Let's get started:

Following the shaping of the stern knee, I took it up to Dad's shop in Maryland to glue it to the second component of the stern, known as the horn timber. This was done to make shaping the timber in the athwartships dimension easier once the backbone is complete, but due to the temperature constraints of the glue, I required a heated workspace (resorcinol won't cure below 50ºF, and winter was still hanging on hard at the time. Dad's workshop, however, had a nice wood stove that kept the place toasty even in the depths of the polar vortex:

Once fastened together and faired, they matched the patterns quite well, and looked practically ready for assembly:

The next piece to be shaped was the aft deadwood. Unlike the stern knee assembly, which rests on top of the aft end of the keel, the aft deadwood sits beneath it. I glued up this piece out of two wedges that were sawn out of the "good" end of my original defective keel. Here they are right after they were cut out:

As before, I took them up to Dad's shop to be glued together, then hauled them back down to my place on my trailer. Upon arriving, I then realized that I was not strong enough to move them on my own, and so decided to shape the piece on top of the trailer itself. It was still spitting a wintry mix that weekend, so I also improvised a temporary shelter over my workspace with the aid of a tarp and some 2x4s:

The other car belongs to my mom, who was on vacation in the Galapagos throughout all this schlock; lucky her. In order to form the highly angular shape of the piece, I made a number of lateral saw cuts, as Larry Pardey recommends in Details of Classic Boat Construction, and then used a hammer and chisel to remove the excess between each one:

I then used a power plane and belt sander to turn those "stair steps" into straight diagonals. When finished, it looked sort of like a puzzle piece in profile:

While from above, looking aft, I got my first glimpse of the shape of the hull:

Because of the way it interfaces with both the deadwood and the stern knee, I decided to wait until the entire assembly was bolted together to shape the sternpost. In the meantime, I set to work on the forward components of the backbone - the stem, stem knee, forefoot, and forward deadwood, which will be the subject of the next post.