11th of February:

I'm trying to work out the cockpit and seating arrangements. The fore/aft beam you see is a hollow box beam and is stupidly overbuilt like the other beams. Never mind. Those little diagonal braces really stiffen up that leeward panel but will intefere with sleeping accommodation. It's probably a long while before I'll need to wory about that though.

5th of February:

I'm working on a couple of paddles. Oregon shafts, pine blades. The longer one is intended for steering and the other for propulsion but really I just guessed the shapes and proportions. I've only shaped the steering paddle at this stage.

Update 23rd of January:

Major Progress!

Well actually the only thing I've done since yesterday is glue up the leeboard bracket, but it dawned upon me that all the major parts are finished enough to do some lawn paddling and see how it all looks assembled.

Here’s an update on my progress as of the 22nd of January:

The 6.9m hull is mostly epoxy coated inside and out, decked and has dagger-cases in place. These may or may not get used.

I’ve started some rough fairing of the bottom but I don’t think I’ll take that very far. I hate the poisonous dust and I won’t be racing anyone.

After days of scraping, smoothing and epoxy-coating I can finally say the crossbeams are done. I really didn’t expect them to be so time consuming. The web is 9mm plywood. Flanges are strips of timber known as "Oregon" in Australia. I think this is also called Douglas Fir. A thin cap strip of pretty pink flooded gum covers the edge of the plywood web. I'm now convinced that these beams are a bit over-built, but I'll be happy to not have to worry about breaking them.

While I was fussing over ama designs, my copy of Gary’s book turned up. I decided to go with the simple method for building a diamond section ama he describes, changing the proportions slightly to suit my boat. That ama was the easiest part of the project so far, by a large margin. I’m working on a simple mount to allow a leeboard to be attached to the ama.

Here's an idea I had for a leeboard. It allows an efficient directional section to be used and has adjustable angle of attack. It would pivot out harmlessly when aback, kick up in shallow water and could be self shunting.

There are more photos in proa_file 6.

Here are a couple of photos of my first proa.  4.3m single chine main hull, deep vee ama. Plywood hulls, solid pine crossbeams. Teenage design and construction.

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