Now having made up the male mold to build the hull upon (its built upside-down) I decided to start from the bottom (top?!) and construct the steel framework for the fin keel. A few reasons for this firstly being that i thought it was too cold (-5!) for gluing all the boat timbers together and secondly to give the timber more time to season (dry out). I had the timber for constructing the framework and masts for the boat cut back in September 2009. All this timber is Scottish Douglas Fir locally sourced.

The keel.

The shape of the keel is formed using 13mm steel re-bar. Again starting with a full size drawing of the profiles taken from J.Benfords offsets then carefully bending the bar to shape and welding all the bits together. This framework then gets three layers of mesh tied to it and two tons of cement and scrap iron poured in. I have decided to leave this until the summer months when its warmer to ensure a good cement cure. TBC...!!