> Have I missed something here? when lofting the guillemot from my copy of
> Nick Schades book I can't really get the end forms to fit the forms
> closest to them i.e. 2 and 15. For example the second forms deck peak is
> 6.44 and keel -0.41 and the bow forms 0" position top 6.45 and bottom
> -0.68 I can just see that the 2nd form is missing 0.27" at the bottom
> or have I neglected something? What to do?

I ran into this too. I went back to the tables to see if I did something wrong but my forms matched exactly. I ended-up shaving some off of the stems. I don't know if this was appropriate, but the curves still look fair. There is definitely a discrepancy in the tables, though.

> Does anyone have some good tricks when it comes to aligning the end forms
> to the strongback? I find this part of the building process a bit
> intimidating.

I trimmed the strongback to the cutout shape on the stems, but found that it was also necessary to trim the sides of the strongback at the bow. It now tapers to a narrow point. I affixed station 2 securely and then mounted the stem to the form. If you start out with the back edge of the stem perpendicular to the dwl, then you can just attach it to form 2 and it will likely be right on the money. Since I put my forms on inverted initially, getting the side-to-side alignment right wasn't as easy as it would have been right side up. I put some scrap strips near the end of the stem sticking straight up so I could go to the other end of the boat and sight down the middle. This worked great. To fix the stem in place, I used a combination of pieces of quarter-round trim fastened with hot-glue, and short lengths of 1x1 screwed to both the form and the strongback. I placed them in any place that had a right-angle that was big enough to use. All this produced a pretty sturdy stem.