Oughtred J II Yawl

by Andrew Kitchen
(New York)

The JII in light air.

Glued Lapstrake Construction

The construction is pretty straightforward glued lapstrake. I used 9mm khaya marine ply for the hull. The first picture shows my approach to spiling the strakes, not original but it seemed the easiest at the time: two long battens are pinned to the moulds and the preceding plank, in the position of the lands. Then short cross pieces are nailed to them like a traditional truss bridge. It worked pretty well. The hood ends were the trickiest, you need a lot of cross pieces to preserve the shape as you lift the plank pattern off the hull and flatten it onto the planking stock.



The old boat building truism that you can't have too many clamps was proved over and over. I own over 50 clamps, plus over 60 of the wooden fork clamps that Iain Oughtred mentions in his book and in all his plans. I still found that there were times when I was using just about the whole collection in one gluing session.



One of the more striking parts of the boat is the wishbone tiller. In fact it was pretty easy to build: just lots of thin laminations of mahogany bent and glued around a form.

Hand-carved blocks, cedar seats and floors

The blocks are home made, out of wenge (african hard wood, very hard), bronze pins and tufnol sheaves. My sailmaker was Douglas Fowler, Ithaca, NY. The boat was launched in June 2004. I showed her at the 2004 Wooden Boat Show. Since then she has attended the John Gardner Small Craft Workshop at Mystic Seaport each June.
She sails on Lake Ontario and on the New England coast.