fretwaterlines: End of the World

Friday, December 21, 2012

End of the World

I guess I missed the apocalypse, which must have happened about five this morning at the moment of solstice. I was asleep, dreaming of strange cuts and awkward clamping positions. But perhaps this is the afterlife--if so, I scored. I get to live in a cool place surrounded by great people, get to have coffee and slow mornings and spend the rest of the day building boats. If that isn't heaven, what the hell is?

We did the last adjustments on the inner gunwale boards, getting them as precisely perfectly exactly just where they are supposed to be more or less. It is so fun to get all my long clamps in use. If only I had more.

A few fasteners were sticking but Josh fixed that.

Then we test-fitted a side panel. It was, as I suspected, pretty close to a straight line along the gunwales. I bet the originals were exactly straight, but the half-inch or so of waver we have in the new boat is an artifact of time and sagging boats and measurements taken over and over again.

Close enough. We scribed and cut a wee eccentricity into the lower edge, marked and cut the upper edge, transferred the lines to a second ply--we are making the 5/8" side out of a 1/4 and 3/8 glued together-- and transferred the pattern to the first panel for the other side. Then we put it on the boat. To celebrate that, both Nevills sisters, Joan and Sandy, came by. Here they are with Greg and Tanner. Five generations if you count Moe as a person and the ghost of Norm in the hull.

We back-screwed the first ply in place until we could get the second one on, as I did not want to bury any screws that held the first ply on beneath a layer of plywood. Sometimes we wreck and have to take these things apart, you see. A few of the back-screws were a touch long, but once again, Josh knows how to fix that...