Over easy

What a Christmas treat—to get to play in the boatshop all day. Again. Josh and Joel came by and we started by putting the chine caps and bottom skids on Moe. They looked so good as stained oak that we are now thinking we might not be able to paint all the trim green as Nevills did. There will still be plenty of green, but we can't bear to lose all that beautiful white oak.

Don and Scott Perry wandered by and quickly ended up with drills and screw guns in their hands. And pretty quick we were ready to roll.

We sent Josh down under to disconnect Moe from the strong back. No easy task, but he got 'er done.

And up she went.

Sometimes it's nice to have five screw guns. We broke down the strongback in short order.

And over she goes.

How did Santa know that was just what I wanted?

White Christmas

In celebration of the upcoming holiday, we painted the boat snow white first thing in the morning. 

Lest it dry undisturbed, we spent the next six hours making sawdust—much to the chagrin of the table saw, who thought sawing a half mile of three-inch-thick oak a bit of an overload. But we persevered and made a healthy pile of bottom skid stock...

... which we planed smooth...

... and routed the edges...

... and oiled and stood by the woodstove to dry for the night. Josh closed out the day with a second coat of enamel on the Moe.

I fired up the Betty Boop shrine for Christmas Eve...

... grateful that we survived yet another apocalypse, and hoping sweet baby Santa sees his shadow in the morning and leaves us lots of eggs.

Plodding onward

Ah, 'twas a day of marvelous procrastination. None of my helpers could make it today, so I kept finding very important things to do. But I finally got some work done on Moe. Cutting and grinding the edges of the floor to near-perfect fairness with the sides was a hellacious project, but it's done. The magic two-o'clock sunbeam from the stairwell is illuminating my progress here.

And a couple of the scarf joints, which were a little rougher than I chose to leave on exhibit, are now faired out.

On the original WEN, most of the screws on the side panels are exposed. Which makes it very easy to do repair work should a fellow need to. But since we countersunk Moe's screws pretty seriously, I went ahead and put some ultralight spackling over the ones on the transom and sides of the boat for aesthetics. I think the enamel with stabilize the cheezy spackle enough to hold it in place and look good, but it will still be easy enough to poke it out of the way if I need to remove the screws for repairs. Not that I plan to be doing a lot of repairs. But the damnedest things happen sometimes.

A light sanding in the morning and it will be ready for its undercoating. We still have around a hundred feet of three-inch-by 3/8-inch oak skid strips to screw onto the bottom before we roll her right-side up for decking. Moe is going to be the beefiest boat I have ever rowed. Heavy white oak frames skinned with 5/8-inch sides and a 3/4-inch bottom. And 3/8 of an inch skids blanketing the bottom to boot. Look out rocks.

Moe's firm, nicely-curved bottom

Earl came by this morning and we cut and ground Moe's new sides fair with the chines. Then we test-fit, marked, and cut out the bottom panels. Joel and Josh came by at the perfect time and we did a multi-stage assembly:

Affix the bottom panel temporarily in place.
Lay the top panel on precisely and mark it with indexing lines so we can easily drop it in place once the epoxy is on.
Set second panel aside.
Life-calk© the first panel to the chines, one end at a time.

Re-affix the first panel in place with a few screws coming up from inside.
Roll straight epoxy on top of first panel and bottom of second. Dawn is documenting this stage.

Spread thickened epoxy all over the place.
Drop second panel on along our precise index lines.
Clamp, mark, and screw.

Do victory dance on top of bottom. (undocumented)

She's a boat. Crude, but we're working on that.

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...

And into the world of epoxy. Saturate the sides...

lay on a thick epoxy filleting blend ( silica, sawdust, and RR2040 epoxy)...

 

trowel it out smooth...

carry it around to the boat...

stick it on...

clamp it in place (I do love my clamps)...

 Screw it on.

 Vwa lah. This thing may float yet.

The proud parents: Joel and Josh; me; Earl (Sandy's former high-school sweetheart, former Cataract boatman, and now Sandy's husband): and Greg.

Cutting little boards into big ones

Usually we cut long boards shorter. This morning we cut the two long side-panels longer. Last week we scarfed two pairs of eight-foot panels together into two 15' 9" panels--losing three inches to the tapered scarf joint. I figured we'd wait and see how long the panels actually needed to be before we fished preparing them. Maybe we'd get lucky and 15' 9" would be long enough. Fat chance. Today we measured Moe and found her side-panels really do need to be a full sixteen feet long. So we added back the wood we lost in the original scarfs. Here I am routing the stair step stack into lovely scarfs--both 15' 9" panels, plus two more pieces about a foot long each to recover our full sixteen feet, all cut at once:

While the epoxied joints were cooking, we measured out, faired, and notched the second chine.

And clamped on guide/supports to make the chine placement much easier.

The chine went on quickly and we ground both chines down level with the bottom along the length of the boat. Then I decided we really ought to put some inner gunwales along the top edge of the forward and rear compartments. Just what Nevills did here is unclear--the pictures I took of the inside of the WEN's hatches left a bit of room for interpretation--as do the plans. We finished out the day by milling out the inner gunwales and notching them in. Every day Moe gets a little more boaty. Tomorrow: the sides.

Chine on harvest moon

Okay, okay, there's only a half moon. But we did get a chine on after thinking that was about to happen all week. After Josh and I spend a few hours putting tension strapping on the forms to get them perfectly plumb and centered...

and after moving a few frames that were not quite right (they went on after whiskey o'clock)...

and re-working the bowpost, which I beveled backward in a fit of confusion last night...

--amazing what a wedge or two will do to straighten things out--

and cutting a mess of triangles off the frames to accommodate the chines...that big ol' goofy eighteen-foot isosceles triangle bent on pretty as could be.

With luck the other one will go on tomorrow and we will start screwing on the sides.