puzzle solved

After drying the planks indoors (our house is nice and warm) for a week and a half, I found that the wood shrunk enough that the joints would now fit! It was very difficult still for the sole, presumably because this is thicker (16 mm) ply and it may still have had more shrinking to do or just simply due to a higher surface area and a stiffer set of fingers. The other planks, cut from 9.5mm ply went in with a moderate tap once "lubricated" with epoxy.

 

All the planks are now joined and ready to be epoxy coated prior to hull assembly

 

puzzling problem

One of the benefits of buying the CNC-cut kit is that all the planking comes with puzzle joints in order to produce long planks without scarfing. These joints lock in place, with epoxy, and then can be glassed or butt-blocked on the inside face for added strength. I'm not sure if this will be required given that there is a lot of surface area for the epoxy to create a strong bond.
Just this weekend, I attempted to dry fit the puzzle joints of the sole of the boat and was shocked to discover that they simply would not fit!

I expected this to slot in with a light tap!

The width of a finger is clearly too big for the "hole"

by approximately half a millimetre

In a panic, I checked all the other planks and the same was true for all. The fingers were 0.4 to 0.8mm too wide for the "holes". Vivier advised that this should not be the case and that the joints should be the exact size. Possibly there was an error at the cutter (somewhere in Queensland). I may have to sand or rasp the fingers to get them to fit! I certainly wasn't looking forward to that.
I wondered if the ply may have expanded due to humidity from the air here in our Tasmanian winter. Wood certainly expands with humidity and hoop pine can expand and contract by 2-3%.
So, I brought the sole pieces inside our warm house. Each day I have been checking them to see if they will fit. No luck yet but the fingers seem to be shrinking.
I hope that after a few more days i will be able to report back that they fit without any (or at least minimal) sanding.

an almost finished Stir Ven

No, sadly, it's not mine! I visited Mike Randall on Saturday in Melbourne. He has been building his Stir Ven for the last 2-3 years and is almost (days away) ready to launch. He has maintained an excellent blog on the construction that is really very useful for anyone building a Stir Ven. Ours will be the second one in Australia (unless there's someone else building one now that I don't know about).

I spent several hours chatting to Mike asking him lots of questions and taking lots of photos of details that will be very useful when I come around to building them.

Thanks Mike and good luck with your launch

making the stem

One option that Vivier provides is to purchase all the ply components of the boat pre-cut with a CNC router. After much deliberation, I went with this option as I decided that the extra cost was worth my time. It is estimated to take an extra 200 hours to cut all the ply parts. I believe it as there are many pieces. Also, this method ensures a much higher accuracy than hand cutting (at least my hand cutting!).
Once receiving the kit there are lots of things that must be done before hull assembly can begin. All the parts must be precoated with epoxy, the centreboard case must be assembled, the building jig or strongback built and the stem and false stem made.
The stem - the piece of timber that continues on from the keelson forwards and "accepts" the planking at the bow end, is laminated from 8 pieces @ 50mm by 5mm.
I used regrowth swamp gum/mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) which is very strong, relatively light and glues very well. I got a load of this timber from a sawmill in Huonville. It was already airdried but I airdried it further. As it was all roughsawn, I had to square off a piece before rough ripping the laminates on a table saw. These were then reduced to 5mm thickness on the thicknesser.
The kit comes with a template for many of the components that are curved, including the stem. So, it was a relatively easy matter to slap epoxy onto the pieces and clamp them against blocks that formed this curve.

Once the glue went off, which was a good 24 hours given our cool winter temperatures here in Tassie, I cleaned it up in the thicknesser and got it to the final thickness of 48mm



After this, the stem is used as a mould for the false stem. The false stem is glued in front of the stem once the planking is complete. This is seen on the finished boat and makes it look traditional. I made the false stem also with 8 5mm laminates and these are now put aside ready for the planking.