Never mind the width, get your scarf on

Its not been a particularly productive week and photo's of the inside of my garage can be a bit boring so here's one I took earlier of a fishing boats in St Ives harbour Cornwall. I've had a couple of chats with Alex Jordan this week. I couldn't understand why the paper pattern of the transom differed so much from the ply template I'd made from the table of offsets. Of course the reason is that Andrew Wolstenholme gives his dimensions to the extreme aft of the transom while Alex has compensated for the bevel by bringing the measurements forward by an inch, the thickness of the transom. The difference is half an inch which was surprising, anyway that's another thing I've learned.
I cut the planks from the pre cut ply in a couple of hours, I used my Japanese Pull Saw which avoided the nasty buzzing of the jig saw and gave a very accurate cut which needed very little sanding. I then started to cut the scarfs. I'm just using my old jobbing plane to rough out the scarf and then going in with my trust block plane to finish off. I know this part of the process puts a lot of people off but it really is fairly straight forward if you sharpen your blade and take your time.

The main thing to watch out for is to make sure you cut the scarf on alternate sides of the plank so that you get a join not a great V shaped void!
I'm going to use the building frame as a work surface for gluing the scarfs which should help keep things fair and even.
I wrote to Steve at North Sea Sails the other day to get a quote for a sail. He made the sail for Caitlin on Iain Oughtred's recommendation. He is a very frendly bloke and liable to chat about all sorts of things, I think he gets a bit lonely in his sail loft over in Tollesbury. He told me he makes lots of sails for Oughtred boats in Norway and Sweden and that he's currently making a set for a Macgregor Canoe being built in Eyemouth. Steve's quote was £399 to include two rows of reefing points a canvas sail bag VAT etc, which seems very reasonable and a good bit cheaper than the quote I got from Jeckells, so Steve gets the job. I think I'm getting ahead of myself again. Back to work. Oh and by the way, its to be a wee girl.