Tuesday 9 August
The weather forecast was bleak, rain and only 11 degC so I wasn’t expecting the great turn up we had today. I also wasn’t expecting Nick S to be the first in the shed and it was great to see him. He is back in Denmark to prepare his house for his wife to come home to including building ramps for which he needed to borrow his tools back from the shed. He was reeling from the price rise in structural timber which he had just bought at Thorntons. He started his day with planing the keelson on boat 2 to get the stem and keel to fit snuggly into place and cleaned up the bow stem bevel.
Next through the door was Adrian trailing his dog Yogi, another well behaved and good looking dog with a purposeful short tail. Adrian got out his trusty rabbit plane to cut the half laps in the beams that I was working on. A great tool for the job as it cuts right up to the joint edge.
Veronica and Barney turned up next and Barney definitely had his nose a little out of joint by being upstaged by Yogi but he settled into the day in the shed until Lesley turned up. He then became very animated splattering Lesley with muddy paws in his joy at seeing her. Us blokes were quite miffed as he pays us not the slightest attention and in fact steers well clear of us when we come and go. After finding a sort of stable work horse for Veronica to be able to finesse the bevel on the stern stem of boat 2 she set to with an assortment of planes.
Lesley was up for more sanding on the inside of boat 1, There was only really one more panel that hadn’t been sanded and she hopped in the boat to tackle it.
Then Roger turned up walking with the support of a hiking stick as he was only a week out from a hernia operation. It was good to get his technical know how back in the shed and the first assignment was to get his small block plain working for Veronica as it really is the best plane in our toolbox. He then moved on to Adrian’s rabbit plane and was able to show Adrian a thing or two about setting it up for different jobs.
After tea break where most of the Danish Coconut Dream Cake was demolished, Nick started the process of working out how the breasthooks could be fashioned to fit into the triangular gap at the bow and stern ends of the inner gunwale. Starting with a piece of 5mm MDF he made a template at the top of the gunwale and then converted that to a piece of 15mm pine which fitted nicely but does not take into account the convex upper surface we would like. Veronica, having watched Geoff Kerr’s video on how to do it was able to join in the discussion and will now be able to pick up where Nick has left off.
I plodded on with the cross beams, measuring and remeasuring before cutting our precious Oregon. I wondered why the plans had position 6’s beam so much lower than its neighbours and tried a higher setting. It didn’t look right so I lowered it until it did. A couple more laps to cut and the beams will be ready to glue in place, along with the top sections of the frames. Note that as we are intending to get the maximum spread between the thwarts I have placed the aft two beams behind the frames so they are more central to the thwarts. The forward beams are forward of the frames as per the plans.
Nick had worked his magic to get a great fit of the bow stem to the inner stem. All we need now is some glueing weather but it doesn’t seem as if there is any on the immediate horizon.
Despite the cold weather (which got noticeably colder at midday) we achieved a lot today and I’m looking forward to another big day on Thursday.
Cheers Dave.