Tuesday, April 14, 2009

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.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the pics. I'm envious of your garage and tools. I'm thinking of doing a little container gardening, and I don't even have the tools to build a small platform. Oh well.

    Keep the updates coming!

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  2. Just remember to take really thin passes on the thickness planer. I don't know how many times I got greedy and ended up tripping the breaker.

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