: What is the purpose for inner/outer stems?

Hi Bobby. Like jay said, the inner stem gives a good landing for each strip. You can get an idea of the inner stem geometry from the shot below. The outer stem gets glued on and caps the end grain of each strip. It's a pretty economical way to beef up the ends of the boat.

I'd like to do some larger sailboats down the road; I think lots of larger scale planking goes this way so I'm glad to have passed through the fire once already. In this shot there's still a lot of shaping to be done up top.