Construction of Two Portuguese Style Dinghies (Small Boats)

Step 6 Cut the Bottom of the Boat.

Place the sides and ribs on top of the excess plywood you have. Trace out the bottom of the boat on that ply and cut it out with a jigsaw.
As you can see with this boat bottom, I had a very hard time making my boat symmetrical. One side is almost straight. I was pretty concerned at this point. But pressed on. I mean, what could I do at this point anyway? The reason this was so skewed was because of the cracking earlier when I bent the sides around the ribs. Again, soak your ply and you may avoid this problem.

Flip the boat over and start using 1" screws to screw the bottom to the bottom of the sides of the boat. I started from the bow and worked my way back.

For some reason the first boat was very easy to do this to, but the second boat was a pain in the neck.

For this boat I spaced the screws fairly far apart so that I could fiberglass between the screw heads, let that fiberglass dry, then take out the screws and finally do a second pass through to fiberglass over the places the screws had been. (next step)