first wooden boat need advice on planking the hull thanks in advance

My advice: go for it -- it is a great way to go!!

I think, though, that you could use something more specific... and we'd be glad to know about your project to help you get the right specifics.

Whether you have plans, are going to get plans, are working from a kit, or have to draw your own will affect how much flexibility you can practically exercise. The size of the boat tells a lot about the size and wood species of the planking. Your own style may tell a bit more about whether the boat will have permanent bulkheads or be built to pop off of a set of station forms (people like to call them shadows these days). How you're going to finish it, whether you're going to race it, all kinds of little things like that might clue people into little hints to make things easier for you.

SO, welcome to the wet set -- what ya buildin'?

the boat is a lobster boat hull it is 42 inches lon and 15inches wide This is a scratch build

i will be using the boat for fun no racing and the molds will be removed when hull is finished

That'll be cool -- I'm working on a lobster boat myself. It's based on a published full-sized design and I'm drawing the model.

Mine's only 32" or 34" and I picked it because the bilges are nicely rounded -- it's got the nice lines of a wooden boat. Are you working from a set of plans?

yes i workin from the pot luck plans on http://www.glen-l.com/designs/workboat/potluck.html

Uhh, yeh: me, too.

I'm working from the lines they posted... I've drawn out the backbone as I'm planning to build it and most of the bulkheads -- though I'm planning to do a little change around the middle. It looked to me like the lines might be doing something just a little unexpected through there. I'm planning on planking mine up in firm 1/8" balsa, then glassing the outside and maybe the inside of the motor and radio areas.

It looks to me like it's got a huge amount of flotation and will probably need a bunch of batterries and maybe extra ballast as well to get it down to the waterline.

Did you get the plans from Glen-L?

yes i got the plans from glen-L i would leave the hull the way it is shown because thats the way real lobster boats look here in maine. for weight i figure that the homelight 30cc engine i have will way enough.

I wasn't going to change much at all... there's just this little mathematical lump I found that may or may not show. I don't want to wait until the boat's finished to know whether it shows or not. It'll only mean thinning the bilges a couple of thirty-seconds on a few of the molds at my scale. (I'm pretty sure my boat will have a beam of 9" or so, so the width is changin by way under half a percent in a fairly small area... should be invisible.

What's the full sized boat use for planking?

the full suze boat uses 1 1/4 by 1 1/2 planking
you may be right about needing extra weight because the full scale boat is desined to hold 100 gallons of water and 200 gallons of fuel

I've got to get out of here, but something else I thought of for your boat...

My dad has a boat he built years ago... the Sterling 42" Chris Craft 42' Corvette. It's got an O&R Compact in it... which I think was a 1 cu.in. engine (2-stroke gasoline mix) rated at 1 HP. The boat is tremendously overpowered... really stands up on its tail and runs like crazy. So your Homelite engine is 80% more displacement than that. I figured I'd pass that on just as a data point that says you don't have to worry about having plenty of power!

awsom