Ready for planking

First Strip, nail them against the moulds, leave the head out so you can easily remove the later. 

#2 put a good portion of epoxy in the lower one and press the next one into it. Use slow drying epoxy, you need about one hour per strip!

#3, Heavy torsion to get strips along the transom. Use 50mm brass nails to nail the strips onto the previous one. Use SS screws to screw them against the stem and the transom. The tension is to high to use nails. Screws should be at least 4 mm thick and about 40..50 mm long. Do not use normal steel one's, thew will corrode because of the moist always in the wood.

The first three strips can be positioned as showed left, after that, some wooden forks can do the trick. This way you can easily put on the strip just by your self. Begin in the middle!

   #5

  #6

  Problem: The nails I used to fasten the strips to the moulds, did not hold, I found out after # 4 and 5 were mounted. Because the latter strips were twisted heavily at the back end, the strips they were mounted to, were twisted in the oposite direction (action = - reaction). On the picture you can see the distance between mould and strips, that was not there in the beginning. I replaced the temporarily nails by screws.

  FIRST STRIP BROKEN!  

It becomes more and more difficult to twist the strips AND to keep them flat against transom and moulds. 

The sixth strip broke when I started hammering in a nail through it, into the first mould after the transom. Obviously the tensions in the wood, as a result of the heavy twisting,  are getting too high. From now on, I put them in position with all kind of tools, pieces of wood and rope, that can be removed when the epoxy has dried out. 

(takes more that 24 hours at this moment because it is only 7 degrees Celsius on average, the minimum temperature for epoxy) 

After the epoxy dried  out I put in the screw though the transom and the nails to connect the strip to the previous strip. This should not be neccesery because epoxy is said to be several times stronger than the wood, but it just feels better. (And of course, the wood can't split that easy with all the nails in it.)

   SECOND STRIP BROKEN!!! 

Strip #8 has to be twisted abour 75 degrees over a lenth of no more that 5 feet, in order to get flat to the transom. Until now I twisted the strip by mounting only one tong at the end of the strip, twisted it the right amount and fixating it with a rope.  The forces became to high now so I had to apply a whole series of tongs, one or two between each mould, to twist the strip bit by bit towards the transom. This seems to be the solution.