Those of us who have built boats know that boats are complex shapes and joining their various parts can be a tricky business. Back in 1981, I discovered a good way to make accurate fits in Roger Simpson’s article, “The Incredible Joggle Stick,” in WoodenBoat No. 39.Simpson cut the device he called a joggle stick from 1/4″ plywood, giving one side a sawtooth edge with “teeth” about 2-1/2″ apart and the “gullets” numbered. To create a pattern for a cabin bulkhead that would fit the inside curve of the hull he’d built, he clamped a piece of plywood as a “tally board,” which would serve in a way similar to a spiling batten, to an overhead deckbeam. He pressed the joggle stick against it, positioned with its point in contact with the hull. He then traced both edges of the joggle stick on the tally board and wrote the number of the gullet at the corresponding spot on the tracing.After tracing on the tally board as many locations as he required to define curves, straight lines, and corners, he set it on the plywood that would become the bulkhead. With the joggle stick positioned on the tally board in alignment with the tracings, he would make a pencil mark at its point. Connecting the dots plotted on the plywood provided the line he could cut to for a precise fit. Simpson noted the joggle stick was “fiendishly simple, revoltingly accurate, and beautifully fast.”
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I used a variant of Simpson’s tick stick, but marked inches along the length of the stick and then just drew a straight line and a tick mark with the inch number on the reference board to use as a guide on the markup.
Thank you for taking the tick stick to a new, more efficient level!
If any tip ever needed a video to go with it, this is it.