Missed it by (5mm) That Much - 34 Hours

I have decide to jump ahead a bit and start the build of the rudders while various pieces of the keel and stem post soak up some epoxy. As part of the build plans there is one sheet that shows the layout of all parts built out of plywood. This layout is to minimize waste. This means that many parts are butted against each other on the layout of a sheet of plywood.

Four copies of the rudder are cut out of a sheet. Transferring the drawing of the rudder to the plywood was simple enough it’s just that in cutting out the first one I went a little wide at the two points where the copies meet. Luckily my cut was on the 6mm plywood that attaches onto two layers of 9mm(rudder is 30mm thick). The luck is the lower part of the rudder is planed down on the trailing edge effectively making the 6mm pieces a few mm narrower so that in the end the 5mm goof will vanish into wood shavings.

Lesson Learned: When parts are shown touching in the layout and take up an entire dimension of the plywood, triple check measurements and cut on the line where the points meet. If I can’t determine exact measurements, then as Wharram suggests, build a template first to test fit on the expensive plywood.