Finishing the Gunwale Guard

Last week odd free time was spent screwing the remaining gunwale guard to the remaining oak rail. Yesterday, the pieces were installed on the stern transom. So we spent today installing the leather corners on the stern. The pieces for the stern corners were more square than trapezoidal because the corner was closer to 90 degrees and that shape seemed to work better. Next we began figuring out how to install covers on the end pieces. After deciding what shape would work best, we cut out two of them. Below, John screws the outside part of the piece onto the boat.

This is what the finished stern gunwale guard looked like. The whole finished project looks very yachty and we like it.

Installing the Gunwale Guard

Since our last post, we have had a few things that have taken up our time but we have slowly been installing the gunwale guard around the gunwales of the pram. The gunwale guard we are using looks like the photo below. It is woven material glued to a 3/4 round piece of rubber. We have used 3/4" copper tacks to fasten one side of the material to the top of the gunwale.


Then the 3/4 round part is folded over the tacks and the right angle in the piece of oak gunwale and fastened on the outside with stainless steel screws and washers.


All of this worked pretty well and we were progressing nicely until we got to the corners. The gunwale guard just didn't want to install nicely around the corners. It looked terrible. We thought about what to do and asked some boat builders what they would suggest and the answer seemed to be to fashion some sort of leather covering for the corners. So, where to get the leather? We looked around in craft sites on the internet and finally bought a piece of cowhide on ebay. The piece was much bigger than we needed but we didn't know exactly how we were going to fashion the things so we had enough to experiment.

Today, we cut the gunwale guard that we had tried to put around the corners so we had two ends at almost right angles to each other. We cut a wedge shaped piece of the gunwale guard and fitted in into the space between the two ends and fastened it with our copper tacks. Next we cut a piece of leather shaped like a trapezoid, 3-1/2" at one end and 5" at the other and about 4-1/2" high. We worked the smaller end of the piece of leather until we could fasten it to the outside of the gunwale rail and the bow section of the boat. Next we cut a slit in the longer end of the piece about to the corner of the boat. By putting one end over the other, we fashioned a corner in the piece of leather. Next we trimmed off the pieces so they fit nicely into the inside of the gunwale and the bow piece. We fastened that with two of our screws with finish washers. "Cut to fit" is the way I would describe the process. The result looked something like this ...