Upper port hull planking begun

Before I could start planking today, I had to finish mounting the deck battens. I decided to start with the bow deck section. This part of the plans has an slightly scary sentence "....break or cut battens if needed for correct hull shape...", scary in the sense that it sounds somewhat ill-defined (you don't get much of that in Ian's plans). However, after carefully poring over pictures of other batten'ed molds, and existing hulls (see the f-boat.com site, and pictures of Oliver's hull in Germany), I felt like I had a good idea of what needed to happen.

First I ran the top three battens forward of frame #3, drew a vertical line down the transition point, and then cut them off at a (rough) angle that would meet the battens coming from frames 1 and 2:

The plans specify the transition point as somewhere between 6-8 inches in front of frame 3; I tried to split the difference (7") and ended up at about 7 1/2" inches -- close enough for me.

Then I made some short battens to form the flat deck section. Here I'm scribing a miter line for the topmost batten:

Do this three times, and you end up here:

The forward battens protrude past the rearward ones a bit, but that was fixed quickly by sanding them down flush. Then I squeezed some wood-glue into the miter joints and clamped them for awhile to dry. I saved many pictures of this area, and will reserve these particular battens for the same spot in the starboard mold (in order to make sure the hull halves end up with the same shape).

With that part done, I moved on to the rest of the battens (easy) and then started the upper gunwale foam sections. Here's the first one about to be screwed down from behind:

And eventually:

Finally the part I was waiting for: planking of the deck sections. These are specified to be 3/4" foam, and I have to say that this thick stuff holds a screw like there's no tomorrow -- much better than the 3/8" stuff. All those builders of bigger boats have it easy, I'm telling ya. :-)

In my case, my deck foam is just slightly thicker than 3/4" (21 mm?), since I got a deal on odd-sized offcuts from Noahs.

Here's the first few planks set in, along with the bow deck. I bogged the bow-deck into place already, because it was already a near-flush fit with the gunwale foam and I didn't want to dremel it out later:

I haven't needed the heat gun or the heat box yet, but this foam sure doesn't like to bend much. Good thing the deck has such a gentle curve to it.

Here's my popstickle-stick idea in action (for spacing the planks apart):

And this is where I ended up for the night:

The plans advise installing all of the high density deck inserts at this stage; I will definitely do that for all of the ones that are specified in the plans. I'm a bit concerned about the ones I don't know anything about -- I've really never sailed before (2-3 times doesn't count), and the plans are bit bare in this area. If other F22 builders have already explored down this path, could you please drop me a quick email listing the other deck fittings you've added high density inserts for?