Nutshell Pram EXCUSE ME Quarter Knees

 15 Apr 22:

Time to shape the quarter knees for the Nutshell Pram, the knees reinforce the connection of the gunwale to the transom. We started by finding the angle between the transom and the gunwale with our pocket bevel, and cut out that angle on a piece of 1 inch thick (4/4) mahogany. Next we drew the curves of the inner knee shape, the part that faces the inside of the boat. This shape was constrained in one direction by the width of the board that we had, about 7 inches wide, but the side that ran along the gunwale could be as long as we wanted. We referenced the plans, drew out traditional knee curves in the inner face and cut the inner knee shape.

In this photo we have jumped ahead to the finished knee for the port side, bow transom knee. The bevels for the transom and gunwale have been cut so that the knee fits with a slight rise going up the face of the transom. Another option would be to run the knee straight across, parallel to the waterline, but we liked this look better.

This is the bevel for the gunwale.

This is the bevel for the transom. 

We found these bevels both by using the bevel gauge and marking a line to cut to, and also did some of the marking by using the boat as a reference. You might need to zoom in to see the pencil line that we marked to use as a cutting guide. A pro builder might have chosen to cut this these bevels with their bandsaw or jigsaw when they originally cut out the knee, but we wanted to sneak up on it.

We shaped the bevels with a Stanley #5 plane, making several trips back and forth to the boat to check the fit. 

This video may help explain the 3 bevels needs for the quarter knees: https://youtu.be/LPCFqfJTjl8

So let's look at the stern transom now, here is the first gunwale-transom bevel. We used the bow knee to get the same basic lengths along 2 edges.

We also copied the inner curve on each tip from the bow knee, then free handed the rest of the inner curve to make the stern knee shape.

We cut out the blank with a jigsaw, and then shaped the next transom face and gunwale face bevels with the hand plane.

Log of EXCUSE ME.