Thursday 31 March
When I arrived this morning I was able to have a quiet moment to have a good look at our first planks and on the whole they are symmetrical and fair. But on closer inspection I realised we had forgotten to clamp the plank down to the foremost mould. Something we will have to get right next time as there is very little we can do about it now. Luckily the bulge is the same on both sides of the boat. In our defence it is very hard to get a clamp on that first mould.
The team was assembling consisting of Nick and Adrian and Paul W. Adrian sat down and did his homework first. The rest of us had already watched Geoff Kerr’s video on planking a Caledonia Yawl which you can find on YouTube. My brother-in-law, John, came for a visit brandishing fruit cake and dark chocolate digestives which were pounced upon later at tea break. Unfortunately there wasn’t much for him to see except a lot of head scratching and pushing of planks into place as we tried to get Plank 2 to line up with sufficient overlap. Boatbuilder Pete Wilson dropped in and made some helpful suggestions about setting the planks with the proviso that what we did on one side of the boat we had to do on the other in equal quantities and small increments. In the end we got a near enough fit to the planned plank shape and marked to scarf joints for their glueing position.
Nick and Paul found the best way to cope with the anxiety around fitting the planks was to go off and prepare the scarf joints on the third pair of planks.
JP and Veronica turned up in time to work out how we were going to glue both the number two planks on our narrow bench. After some false starts, we came up with the plan to glue them on top of each other separated by baking paper with the convex side of the plank sticking out on the clamping side of the bench. This required a lot of flipping the planks about to get the glueing surface upwards and then to get them sitting in their correct spots guided by nails in the bench top. At least this way we know that the planks are exactly the same to start off with on both sides (we’ll have the same problems fitting them on both sides!). Veronica donned gloves and wetted up the joints and I mixed the glue and buttered up the middle planks. Then we carefully assembled our plank sandwich wrapped in baking paper and clamped it down with good squeeze out (like melted cheese in the sandwich toaster).
Veronica and I were left to clean up. I did the epoxy in vinegar while Veronica did the cups in soapy water, or was that the other way round? Just as I was about to close up Harry came in after a trip to Albany and had a chat about his hearing aid saga. Then JP came back to check the glueing had gone well.
We’ll be back on Monday to do more of the same. Have a great weekend.
Cheers Dave