I've had a week off work and have been making great progress... although all the scraping and sanding still remains to be done, most of the timber work is well under way. What has been surprising is how long this has taken me - every little piece takes much longer to fit than on a piece of rectangular furniture because of the curves in all dimensions. Fun though! Not all the joins are as perfect as I would like them, but I think they are "good enough" and the eposy certainly fills the odd gap here and there!

I have opted for 'open gunwales' largely because of the traditional look - it was a lot more work making all the spacer blocks but I think it looks good:

Having finished the gunwales I moved on to getting the floors shaped (a photo of this later) and fitting the thwart risers, which are full-length, I guess adding rigidity to the hull. Then it was on to making up the floor boards, which I have cut from some old tongue-and-groove Kauri. Good to use recyled materials, but again a lot of extra work drilling and plugging nail holes to improve the look. I have glued spacer blocks between each of the boards and the very front and back so that these will be smooth - I remember in boats in the past the annoyance of various strings and things getting caught around the ends of the floorboards!