24 Feb 2022
The weather today was grey with a warm drizzle but it couldn’t dampen my excitement about the imminent arrival of the St Ayles skiff kits. Thanks to the really helpful guys at Denmark Haulage the kits were being delivered to Thorntons Mitre 10 in the morning. Denmark Haulage are now a sponsor having shipped the kits from Perth to Denmark gratis.
I checked in at Thorntons on my way to the shed at 9am and was told they should be there within the hour. At Harry and Kay’s shed I found Harry and JP chatting and so I put the kettle on. JP and I had a robust discussion about the moulds and the need or otherwise to square them all up. Adrian arrived to referee and Harry made a hasty exit. We then worked out that some of the moulds were off station by up to 12mm and Adrian and JP set about correcting that by re-attaching the top batten positions. I made tea and cut up the fruit cake as a peace offering which we all tucked into.
I went over the road and spotted the Denmark Haulage delivery truck leaving Thorntons so we all piled into my ute and drove over there. We wandered around the yard in search of people and our packages and soon found first the timber packages and then the pallet of the 18 plywood panels. It was then that it became obvious that this was too large a load for my twin cab ute to carry safely or legally. We knew Chris W’s trailer would be big enough and as it was nearby, we went around to look at it but it was locked and Chris wasn’t around. Back at Thorntons we had one of those wonderful bits of generosity that you get in country towns when they offered to lend us their delivery truck to drive our stuff around the corner. Luckily JP had his HGV license from fire fighting days and so became the designated driver.
The packages were loaded by fork lift and off we went. Thanks Thorntons.
We unloaded the kits panel by panel onto the floor of the shed and I set about marking up each piece of the puzzle from the panel sheets that we had downloaded from the Scottish Coastal Rowing website. There were a couple of differences between our CNC pattern and the one originally supplied by Jordon Boats but it wasn’t too hard to work out. It took a bit of concentration though to get it right. I just hope that we, the builders, know that A is for Aft (the back end) and F is for Fore (the front end), P is for Port (now this is where it gets tricky, usually Port is the left side of the boat but when its upside down its the right side), S is for Starboard (the other side from Port!). And M is for the middle plank which has a Fore and Aft end so you know which way up to attach it. Clear as mud!
Meanwhile Adrian and JP were getting on famously with the re-alignment of the moulds and fixing down the stem mould ends to the floor. They both were pleased as punch to see the alignment cord shoot down the middle of the holes in each mould.
At that point we called it a day and will reconvene on Monday at 9am to begin cutting out the kit’s component pieces for Boat 1.