Phill has my complete admiration for working in wood. However, it was the manufacturing I was thinking about. Some of these high end woodworkers have developed equipment and techniques for construction and production that I have never heard of anywhere else. They are combining CAD and CNC routers with visual mapping systems that can recognize and cut around bad spots in the wood or locate interesting knots and burls in low stress areas
Imagine, that you want to build a strip planked catamaran hull using female vertical half molds. You could feed the CAD data to a system that would calculate the individual battens. Each batten would have a unique taper, edge angle, edge to locate it in the mold, and provisions to locate the bulkheads and dagger board trunk. That data goes to a CNC router that cuts and numbers each batten.
Now take the battens to the mold. Lay in mold film, apply the outer layer of epoxy, then light glass for the skin, next a layer of epoxy with filler to accommodate imperfections in the wood, and finally the battens with epoxy applied to the edges. Then lay in the peel ply/mat and vacuum bag it.
Once you start working at this level there are lots of things you can do. For example:
You can cut the battens out of a laminate that spells the name of the boat out on the outer skin using different colored woods or laminate composites in for strength in critical areas.
You could close out the hull half's with an ultra light weight vertical bulkhead that the runs the full length of the hull. It turns the hull half's into a "D". Then you join the hull half's by gluing the flat section of the "D"s together.
Precession cut veneer and laminate it over a mold. You can add composite or different woods inside for strength. This would allow you to build a monocque hull with no internal bulkheads, like my A.
Vacuum bake the wood to remove the water and use high pressure (5000-10000 psi) to force moderate temp cure (150-200F) epoxy into the wood. This completely seals the wood and improves the strength.
A lot of things have developed since tortured ply, if you want to build a production boat out of wood
