Knees

In a previous post I showed how the knees are laminated and today I'll show how I shaped them to custom fit my boat.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I made some templates from the boat itself so I could eliminate a lot of trial and error cutting and sanding. In the picture above I've got my template on top of one of the knee laminations to get it ready to trim for the boat.

Here is the stern knee clamped in place to check for fit.  I don't want to finish it yet until after I have the stern bench finished and can get my wife to sit there and make sure it's comfortable.

In the pic above you can see what the thwart knee looks like after first using a template to get the general shape then trial and error fitting.  Once I had one that fit perfectly I used it to quickly make its duplicate for the other side.

Here's how it looks mocked in place.  By the way, I made the knees out of red cedar and I tried to alternate the colors so that I got this striped effect.  I hope it looks good once it's epoxied and varnished!