The first step was lofting – well that’s what I grandly call it. It refers to the process of transferring the 3D boat’s lines to flat pieces of wood. In fact the designer has already done that and it’s just a matter of scaling up the A4 drawings to full size sheets of plywood.
We used a bit of plastic cable trunking that I had handy to form a spline, like this:
As the canoe is symmetrical fore and aft (as well as port to starboard!) both sheets of plywood will have identical cuts, so I clamped them together. (Of course, that means I was risking ruining two pieces at once!)
Then it was out with the electric jigsaw:
Bateau.com recommends using a small circular saw to get smooth curves. Mine came out a little wiggly, but I don’t think that matters as epoxy glue fills in gaps quite nicely [as it happens, greater errors later on made my wiggly cuts insignificant].
Here are the resulting pieces of wood laid out on the ground:
Next step, stitching it all together – it might start to look like a canoe soon!