Half Knees

Working on the quarter knees. These are traditionally made from bent tree roots or bending laminated wood or just cutting out dimensional lumber in the form of right angles that reinforce along the top (at the sheer) the major joints. Like, for instance, right here at the athwartship beam on the bulkhead:

The plans call for cutting out some little triangle-ish half-inch plywood plates and gluing them over the gunwales, but I’ve decided instead to use dimensional lumber because I think it’ll work (and look) better with the gunwales I have planned. Of course, that means redesigning a few things like the notches in the beams here. What would’ve taken fifteen minutes with a saw last spring while I was bending the beams took five hours now to get not as right with a chisel, but it was easier than starting over.

I had a remarkably dense scrap piece of fir (I think) that I figured might be great for this. A bit tight to get two (or actually four) quarter-knees out of it given the angles. Don’t forget that the hull sheer is not at a right angle to the curved beam here so the board needs to be cut at the proper angle (which, by the way, changes significantly from aft to fore) making it an even tighter fit.

To fit it, had to sacrifice a little in the design but after quite a bit of working and reworking came up with something to fit:

What I particularly liked about these joints I came up with is that once snapped into place, they hold on their own, so much so that grabbing both sides of one, I can lift the entire boat up by it. Before epoxying.