The centerboard and its case

I am working on preparing and building the frames moving aft ... next step is the centerboard and its case.
The case doublers, seat and deck supports are now glued and before I can build up the case it is wise to build and give the right shape to the centerboard.
The board is glued from strips or lamells of both hard and softwood. Hardwood (mahogany) is mostly for the leading edge and the pivot area, while softwood (pine) is used elsewhere. While I was at it I also included a couple of hardwood strips in the middle of the lamination to ensure stiffness.

Once glued together, one realises how heavy and thick the stock is!
The profile of the board is so important as it affects the sailing performance of the boat. Not easy therefore to embark on this shaping task given what's at stake.
John Welsford (aka the boat designers) provides a template for the board cross shape. It goes from a 10mm radius circle at the leading edge, to maximum thickness (60mm) at 175mm and then tapers to 5mm thickness at the trailing edge.

First go at some real boatbuilding...

This weekend  our Pathfinder build got into its actual operational phase. Enough fiddling with CAD software, printing templates on paper for checking, assembling scaled models, ... etc...
Hand over the epoxy and lets start putting together the parts we got just before the summer from the CNC cutting shop.
I decided to prepare each component of the boat frames from bow to transom. First on the list was therefore the stem profile, followed by frame 1, frame 2 etc..
At this stage I am glueing doublers and floor supports.

I could not resist and had a go at dry assembly the fore section of the boat. The notches I included in the cutting templates allow to place the frames precisley on the stem profile.
In these pictures is the progress over just a weekend. In the background hanging on the garage wall is the floor planks and their puzzle joints .