Thursday 29 September
Another warm day in the shed brought with it a great turnout of boatbuilders. John I had returned from Broome and was keen to get started despite an injured wrist from lifting a suitcase. He, Geoff and Paul all went to town with the sandpaper on the inside of boat 2.
Veronica and Lesley sanded the gunwale battens and the rudder for boat 2.
The biggest surprise was when Barney came in sporting his new hair cut. He looked like a totally different dog.
Geoff had brought jam tarts for tea break which disappeared in one sitting. We had all been working up a sweat sanding and it was good to sit down and have some water and tea.
I had been working on fitting the rudder gudgeons and pintles. The first one went well with the bolt hole going through the stern stem and more or less coming out at the fixture hole on the other side. However my third hole went horribly wrong and I ended up with two holes that didn’t meet in the middle. More drilling widened the hole until the bolt could get through to where it was supposed to. I later epoxyed the deviated hole. The fourth went well. The drill holes through the rudder for the pintles was much easier.
I helped Lesley and Veronica to glue the scarfs on the battens to get away from the difficulty of drilling straight, but when we had finished I had to tackle the next difficult drilling operation. JP turned up to help me find the long 8mm drill bit he had bought to drill the holes for the U-bolt towing eye. He then helped me drill the holes. I firstly drilled holes through a 30mm thick piece of hard wood to act as a guide. The u-bolt went through that OK and so it was on to the the bow stem with trepidation, especially from JP. The first hole was relatively easy and came out nice and centrally in the inner stem. We used one side of the u bolt to hold the dodgy drilling jig in place and crossed our fingers snd rilled the second hole. The u-bolt fitted at the point of entry but quickly tightened as it went in. testing it on the inside we realised the curved stem had again caught me out and the holes were converging slightly. I then reamed the hole until we could get the u-bolt in and out freely. We will treat the drill holes with epoxy resin to make them waterproof and finally fix the fittings after the outside painting is completed.
We are going to be filleting boat 2 tomorrow and preparing the blocks of the central strip on the inner gunwale. On Saturday at 10am we are going to turn boat 1 over again and switch the two boats around. All welcome to come and have a look and help lift with morning tea thrown in.
Cheers Dave