Planing the sheer clamps

With the hull complete, the next step is to plane the sheer clamps at the correct radius to accept the deck. Your grandfather's plane will do the trick just fine, but there's nothing like a power planer to make a man feel alive. You can shred your boat into tiny chips in no time flat with one of these, so it pays to go carefully.

The radius on the foredeck is 16 inches, so to make sure I don't plane too much, I made a plane guide of out a bit of scrap plywood. To cut the radius accurately, i made a compass out of my router and cut it with an edging bit: anchor one end of a 16" stick to the scrap plywood, clamp the other end to the router, and viola, a circle-cutter. Of course, I wasn't interested in the circle. I was interested in the outer part. Here's what my plane guide looks like, and the close-up shows how it's used. I simply planed the chines until they matched the guide.
 
The aft deck gets similar treatment, except with a 60" radius, which is not far from flat. Between the rear bulkhead and the deckbeam is what's called a "rolling bevel," which means that the curvature of the deck goes from a 16" to a 60" radius. It sounds fiddly, but it's not. I freehanded it with the power planer in no time.