Transom

After sanding the transom and finding a few more bits of rot, I decided to just fill the holes and laminate a nice Kauri veneer over it. I got a piece of 250mm Malaysian Kauri ripped and finished to 5mm thick. After cutting the basic outline I spread epoxy onto both sides and clamped it to the transom There is a join towards the bottom as the transom is about 450mm deep, but there is only a very small gap in the join and it will be mainly covered by the name there, it will match all the other glued up cracks and things as well.... :)

The wood of the transom and the veneer both looked very similar wet out with the glue, so even though I'm still not 100% sure on that, I'm wondering if the transom is one piece of Kauri as well. It is definitely original, so it should be Kauri in any case... but the growth rings grain pattern is quite different. That could be just how it is sawn though, and it does have the same speckly grain that Kauri has...

I used the rope to pull the top of the boards clamped over the veneer down and also to pull the edges around the slight curve of the transom. There is nothing between those boards and the veneer to stop them sticking, but I made sure to break the glue joint before the epoxy set too hard and so it was easy to take them off when it had all hardened.