June 2002 - First work - first cut.

Today my good friends Jo and Jon came over to help Sue and me start work on the punt. We started out by marking out the 'stations' on the first sheet of marine ply - these are 305mm intervals on the wood that are used to measure individual points on the outline of each piece. Here you can see me doing just that:

There are six pieces to the punt - the bow and stern parts of the bottom, and the left and right sides of the bow and stern. Here I am measuring out the bow part of the bottom. Fortunately my garage is 20cm longer than the length of the punt, so I will be able to store it in there when the epoxy glue is drying.

We used the picnic benches in my garden as work benches for sawing. Initially we used the cheap B&Q circular saw to cut out the bottom pieces, which turned out to be quite tricky. The circular saw basically churns away a 3mm strip of wood, and it's hard to see where you are going. Jon cut on the inside of the line on one piece, and I cut on the outside of another, so we had to use a saw to remove a sliver from each side of my piece to bring them back to the same width. Here you can see Ongar sitting on a piece of ply in my garden.

The side parts were much more curved, so Jon suggested using the handsaw to cut them out. This turned out to be much more effective, and we performed all the rest of the cutting with this saw. Jon did most of the sawing (and to be honest, Jo did most of the measuring, as she is very meticulous). The yellow quick grip clamps you can see were very useful - you can clip them on and off in seconds, and they hold well.

Each piece of ply had an annoying makers sticker on it, that was hard to remove. In the end we resorted to using white spirit to dissolve the glue, and a wallpaper scraper to scrape it off after soaking. Even Ongar had a go...

We were going to glue some of the panels together using a rather amusingly named 'butt strap' - a piece of ply 135mm wide and 90% as wide as the join to be butted, but it turns out that the West epoxy system I bought from Robbins Timber didn't have the required filler, so I will have to order that before I can do any gluing. According to the instructions you need filler if you are going to do any bonding (as per the butt strap joins) or filling (which is required for the stitch and glue technique that makes up the boat's chines - the seams between the various panel of the boat).

All the panel cutting took the four of us from 12 noon until about 6pm, after which we ordered delivery Chinese food. We were lucky with the weather - there was a brief spell of drizzle for five minutes, but despite ominous clouds it remained dry for the rest of the time.