Core Skills: Planking

This is a five-day course ending Friday

Planking a traditional wooden boat can seem challenging given that most plans expect you know how to lay out the planks and join them together. On most hulls, each plank is a different shape and can require its own pattern. Once the plank is laid out and cut, there is still the matter of fastening to the hull, which might require steaming and rivets. Most of these tasks are unfamiliar to the average woodworker looking to build a boat. In the Core Skills: Planking course you will learn how to line off a mold for planking, choose the right planking stock, and choose the proper fastenings. Creating a pattern for each plank, known as spiling, will be covered for both carvel and lapstrake planking, along with scarfing, beveling, and cutting gains. Students will have the opportunity to take several planks through the entire process and fasten them to boats already under construction at the school.

Core Skills is a curriculum designed to complement and expand on our Fundamentals of Boatbuilding class. Each class in the Core Skills curriculum is focused on one core element of traditional small-boat construction. Our inaugural offering includes topics such as planking, setting up a building jig, and fitting out a boat. While these topics are covered as a portion of Fundamentals of Boatbuilding, Core Skills offers dedicated, weeklong exploration of each of them. Core Skills classes also offer hands-on learning of many of the topics introduced in our Mastering Skills video series. Students may take any or all of these classes in whatever order best suits them.