Scarf! Scarf!

So... three big but non-photogenic steps this weekend:

A) I epoxied the two sheets of 12mm ply that will make up the bottom panel together.

B) I cleaned up space in the garage for boatwork.

C) I drove over to my wife's grandparent's house and used their thickness planer to plane down the 4/4 stock to 20mm. Also planed one piece of the 8/4 down to 40 for the centercase pieces.

I am now ready to spend this week ripping and crosscutting some 20mm stock down to size for making the centerboard, and I have the stock to make the centercase. I'll also probably spend some time fitting the frame pieces together. Next weekend might bring the building jig. If so, I could cut out the bottom panel, fit it to the jig, and have something resembling the first step in a boat in my garage!!

OMG!

Lumbering along

As it was a long weekend, I decided to try to make some more progress. Thursday I went to the lumber yard and bought some wood. A LOT of wood. Brought it home in the truck, got it loaded into the garage.

Friday, with the help of my stepson/apprentice, I got some of the 8/4 white oak ripped down to 20mm width for use as stringers. It's amazing how much wood goes into even a smallish boat like this! In the photo above, the pieces for the stringers are the three with red painted ends. That's about 2.1 inch thick by 10inch wide by 12 foot long chunks of oak. I did find some checking on a few of the pieces (see below)... will have to find out if this will cause a big problem with the finished boat. I'm hoping not, since the stringers don't provide much structural strength, but I'm going to ask the forumites to be sure.

Saturday, built a scarfing jig and made the first scarf joint on the 1/2" ply that will form the bottom plank of the boat. Got through most of it with the table saw, then cleaned it up with my Lee Valley low-angle block plane. Never used a plane before, but this sure is a nice tool!

This weekend I hope to get the building jig together. I'm also hoping to get over to my wife's grandparent's place where I have a thickness planer available to thin down the stock for my centerboard.

Progress!!

So, after a bit of a hiatus, I'm making progress again. No pics this time, but I've cut out one my pieces for Frame 6, and the vertical "add-on" pieces for 3, 4, 5, and 6. I'm through cutting for the day... have to find a better dust collection system. All of the pieces so far have been made using our household vacuum cleaner to catch the dust, and I think it would be a better idea to try to rehabilitate the old shop vac we have rather than break our very expensive vacuum through over-use.

Anyway, I've got all of the rest of the pieces I need to cut out of 9mm drawn on, so it's just more cutting now. I did eventually draw the pieces up in AutoCad and plotted them out 1:1. From there it was very very easy to just trace around the edges of the cut-out shapes.

The temperature is supposed to get all the way into the positive double digits this weekend, so I might take a break from the basement work and go out there to put the building jig together. Woohoo!