Monday 28th March
A small but effective team today consisting of Nick, JP, Mark and myself. The first job that Nick and I tackled was sanding the scarf joints on our first garboard plank, which had come out really well and didn’t take long to make the joint disappear to the touch. JP arrived and helped offer the completed first plank up to the hog and with a bit of grunting and twisting we found that it fitted reasonably well. Mark pointed out that we needed to flatten the glueing surfaces on the hog. This proved tricky with a plane or a sanding block as the tendency is to roll them with each stroke creating a hump in the middle. only by concentrating on sanding the middle section could a flat surface be created.
We made tea and opened a packet fruit cake just as Harry appeared with his guest, John from over east. Then a secret delivery arrived of a bench top grinding wheel and strop. This was quickly whisked away to Harry’s other shed. I made a mental note that this could come in very useful for keeping the tools sharp.
JP made up lots of plywood washers for screwing as we glue the garboards on and then started the preparation for glueing the scarfs on the port garboard. Again we drilled the new hole for the forward end scarf before using the string lineup to see where it was meant to go. We then put it on the moulds and partially clamped it into the fitted position and marked the scarf edges before returning it to the bench. When we used the string method everything lined up beautifully so we banged in the constraining nails and JP got on with glueing while Nick and I marked up the second planks for scarfing and Nick got on with planing the scarfs. Nick had brought in a useful plank of wood to plane the scarfs on along with a robust saw horse as he’d found mine to be lacking in some essential stability refinements.
Time had flown past but we were happy with the progress as we all drifted off for lunch. Back in tomorrow to glue at least one garboard on, possibly two.
Cheers Dave