Tolman Jumbo Skiff

A little bit of progress on building the Tolman Jumbo Skiff. Renn Tolman called for routing a continuous slot in the bottom hull plates and the chine shelf. Then cutting and installing a 1" wide filler of 1/8" thick plywood ("doorskin") with epoxy to join the shelf to the bottom plate. This is over a length of 13' !

As you can see there's an angle involved in this joint and neither the bottom plate nor the shelf plywoods are totally straight and true. I couldn't figure out how to set up a jig to support the router as it would need to travel the entire length of 13'. My solution was to use biscuit joinery because I could match biscuit cuts across the bottom plate to the shelf. Bicuits are ~2" long and were at 5" on center and set in with filled epoxy paste.

I temporarily wire tied the shelf to the bottom plate. Then I backfilled the gap caused by the angle of the shelf to the bottom with fiber filled epoxy. Any rebound of the shelf after the ties were cut would be held in check by the cured epoxy filler. This entire joint gets two layers of fiberglass tape on both sides and will be very strong.

Measurements at several points show that the hull is symmetrical about the center line
and on spec. So far so good!!

Best-
Svein