As I have said in the forum, I am no expert when it comes to
building. The sequence below follows from my experience of planking
two ship hulls and one launch in the past.
The first step was the sheer strake. i.e. the plank at the top
of the hull when it is the right way up.
This and its companion on the other side are the only two planks
with parallel sides in the construction. The plank needs to bend up
to sit in the proper join on part 2. I found that bending these
very thin planks only required then to be dipped in water for a
minute and then gently shaped by passing between thumb and
forefinger.
Before fixing any strakes, you will need to chamfer the edges of
the ribs so that when the plank is lying on edge of the rib, there
is as much contact between the plank and the rib. Also, because of
small tolerances in the cutting of the ribs and fixing them in the
slots in the jig, I realised once they were stuck that the edges
did not line up completely. Therefore some ribs had to be filed
back so that the planks ran naturally from one rib to the next.
Otherwise pushing planks in towards the rib edges causes unsightly
dips in the surface of the hull.
Having fixed the first sheer strake, a similar sheer strake was
added on the other side. It is important to build up each side of
the hull symmetrically.
From now on all the planks had to be shaped. Putting a second
plank next to the sheer strake meant that as you try to bend the
plank naturally towards the bow and the transom, the edge of the
plank nearest to the sheer strake wants to ride over the sheer
strake. The above picture shows each strake with shaped edges.
Ignore where the planks get wider on the extreme left, this is
beyond the end of the transom when fitted.
I gently sanded the surface of the planks every time I added
another one to check for a smooth finish.
I shaped my planks by a combination of careful initial trimming
with some scissors, filing with a flat needle file and smoothing
off with fine, worn emery paper
Having fixed the first two lines of strakes and having looked at
Tomick's example, I decided the next task was to install the
garboard strakes. These are the two planks immediately either side
of the keel. i.e. the follow the centre line of the boat. The
planks are shown shaped to form a point/ridge at the bows. I left
them full width at the transom end.
When fitting the first garboard strake, I made a series of
pencil marks along the centre of the ribs to get it straight.
The picture seems to show a gap running towards the bows. This
in fact was a ridge which sanded out but left a bit of a pencil
mark.
Since I will be painting the launch, this hasn't worried me too
much.
The next stage was to add strakes either side of the garboard
strakes. This involved shaping both at the bows and going towards
the transom.
In the picture below, the mark on the bows seems even worse but
believe me the wood is smooth.
You can see that the transom is almost
filled with plank widths. I decided that the next step would be to
run a plank from the bows to the transom, sub-dividing the space
left in half.
This left two planks which would need to be carefully shaped to
fill the spaces left.
This is the result with just the three other planks to be added
on the other side.