Jewelry and oarstops

More jewelry: A brass-studded necklace.

Gunwales fresh out of the steam box, bent on and scarfed in position.

Moe gets her ten-ton oarlocks wrapped...

 

And we install the stops on Moe's and Betty Boop's new oars.

 Masking off. Pretty leather, lovely stitching.

Blog milestones

The Fretwaterlines blog reached 50,00 hits this week. Unfortunately an increasing about of the traffic is spammers who appear to be from Eastern Europe and are selling poker games, root canals, and vaginal mesh lawsuits. I am not making this up. So I had to increase the pain-in-the-ass level for posting comments. I hope anyone who has something fun to say perseveres.

Extrav-oar-gasma

Whew, it is very late at night but we did leather all the oars for the Betty Boop and the Moe. I had the chance to check the oarstop placement on an original Nevills oar, as well as a Frank Wright oar that allegedly came from Nevills. The handles of Franks oars were about an inch apart when held straight toward each other in the oarlocks. Norm's had about two inches of cross-over. I sat in Moe for awhile checking out the feel, and must admit, Norm's felt better. So that's what Moe and I will be running. A lot of folks can't stand oars that overlap, but depending on their balance, I'm pretty okay with it. Anyhow, stops go on tomorrow.

 The day shift was equally productive. We got all the hatch lids to fit into their spots--five out of six were a cinch--the sixth was an absolute bastard.

The black walnut trim is going on as well. Damn that's pretty stuff.

And I am inventing a gizmo to help me get the screw placement correct for the life-line eyelet placement. It's so annoying to miss the rib when you are screwing them on. This little sandwich rig should give me a pretty good idea on where to shoot.

Oh look: it's almost three ayem. See you in a few hours--

Limited progress

A dozen toy toilets? Couches for the drafting ducks? I'll let you ponder these latest weird things while we go upstairs and sling Moe down for a few finishing touches.

Moe's oars have arrived and we are doing some oar leathering tomorrow night. I thought it would be handy to have the boat nearby to make sure we put the leathers in the right place. If all goes well we'll take Moe over to Winslow in a couple days and see if she floats in the reservoir south of town.

Give up on the weird things? I thought so.

They are custom jam-resistant back-plates for Southco latches. Every now and then something in a hatch will tumble up against Southco latch and you cannot get that sucker open for love nor money. In the case of the Rio Rojo, which will have its hinges buried inaccessibly beneath the lids, it would then become impossible to open the hatch. Better hope it's not the liquor hatch. The other hazard with these otherwise brilliant latches is that if you stuff your hatches really full and force them shut, the bolt end likes to puncture or tear stuff. So I made these little thingamajiggers whitch protect the latch from getting jammed and at the same time, protect the contents of the hatch from the latch. This is how it looks from the bottom with the latch open.

Like I didn't have enough to do already.
Well, the paint wasn't quite hard enough to work on so I thought maybe I could try this idea out...
And as soon as that paint dries I will get to work.

Here is how it will look inside once the hatch is latched. I suppose you could still jam it, but it would be a lot harder.

Then Travel Channel came by for what I thought was going to be a ten minute interview about the Glen and Bessie Hyde story that I wrote a book about some years ago. Nope. They we doing a full episode of a new series on the parks, called Monumental Mysteries. I get to star in the show. Should air in May or June, 9 p.m. on some Thursday or another. Anyhow, the set-up and interview took about four hours. A lot of that was trying to make me look respectable. To no avail. Then it was after eight at night and I gave up entirely.

But hey, at least I got the pinstripes and bowpost on today. 

Tomorrow. 
Everything will go very fast and smoothly. 
For real this time.

Stripe salmon

Really, that mustard stripe does not look like a salmon to me. Not sure why they call it Salmon. But I sure like how it looks.

I'd like to say that today was as productive as the last few but... well, I had this quick project to do up at the house that should take maybe half an hour. Which was fine because today was mostly about a few small preparatory things for tomorrow. At five pee em I finally got the goddam project in the house done and was able to at least paint the salmon stripe. I just never know how a day is going to go. I'm just glad they keep going.

Sheer terror

Yesterday we got the decks smoothed and ready to paint--and painted them. Well, a lot of them. Quite a bit of the horizontal deckwork will be covered by SeaDek foam, so we didn't paint that part.

And we got the hatch lids glassed, nursing the fiberglass over the edges and around the corners. They came out great.

Then came the horrific moment where it is time to cut off the extra side material and rib ends. Which means you are deciding what the boat actually is going to look like. No cut on the boat determines its elegance more than the sheer line. If you get it right it is, in the words of Peter Spectre, heartstopping. If you get it wrong, it looks like a humpback chub. Which is okay, I guess, if you like that sort of thing.

I used a twenty-foot long batten made of foot-wide quarter-inch plywood, left over from the side panels, to determine the exact line. A wide enopught batten, I figure, so that it cannot swerve side to side, but must remain true. That gave me what I wanted. I think. No turning back now.

Now to make sure it is exactly the same on the other side. Here we are making an eight-foot level out of three shorter ones.

And agonizing. This better be right. Is it?

I sure hope so. Here we go.

Janek trimming off what the circular saw wouldn't reach.

Getting a lot closer to being a boat.

And finally, a reward for all out anguish. Flip her over. Measure out the proportional stripe. We went with 71% of the distance between rubber chine and proposed gunwale. That's right between a quarter and a third of the span, which I was told in art class about a half-century ago is where you want it to be. I grovelled along the floor measuring the span every foot or so, calling it to Janek, who punched the calculator and told me where 71% was. Then we connected the dots with a long, flexible straight-edge, disregarding the clinkers. And so the line diminishes with the curve of the hull. Which looks unbelievably sexy. And on went the paint. Rich Red, it's called, by George Kirby Jr. Paint Co., makers of fine traditional marine paint. My god what nice paint. Smooth, creamy, not saggy, and unbelievably high in pigment. Once that is dry we put on the top stripe. Salmon, that one is called, although I would call it mustard.

'Twas a long day in the shop, but it got a lot linger after we quit--turns out about a foot of heavy snow had fallen and was setting up in the driveway. Lora worked the trails, while the snowblower and I did battle with the driveway acreage. Stubbornness won again.

Cheers-

Hatching the lids

Sometimes a process is so complex it baffles me. And then I wake up deep in the night and solve it about a hundred times--sometimes in the delirium of dreams, in ways that make no sense; sometimes in some sort of semi-wakefulness that also sometimes makes no sense. By morning I am too tired to do it anyhow. But somehow, it comes together. These goddam hatch lids were one of those. So many different gutters, so many not-quite-square shapes, so many converging dimensions and angles. Anyhow, today we got 'er done. We cleaned and leveled every gutter. I cut every unique hatch rim out of White Oak and dropped it in each gutter, pre-rabbetted for the lid. Once we had everything working okay, coming in flush with the decks, etc. etc.,  I cut the miters and shimmed them all into place with tongue depressors and stirring sticks, keeping them off the edge of the hatch hole, and off the edge of the hatch lip. Just so. 

Then took each one apart, 5-minute epoxied every joint, and reassembled them with all the shims holding them just so again.

Once the epoxy kicked, I carefully removed each frame, laid it upside-down on each piece of plywood designated for that hatch, marked the plywood, cut it, and epoxied it into the rim. (Yesterday we fiberglassed and flow-coated these lids so the interiors of the hatch lids are now done.)

Tomorrow we see how well the pipe-dreams worked. If the lids still fit, we'll round and glass the exteriors, flow-coat them and sand them for final paint. Then hinges and latches.

Over easy

One last visit to the hull from Mr. Sandman...

Then on with the rubber baby buggy bumpers...

Up in the air...

And over she goes for the final assault on the decks.

Don't you hate it when truckers crab your oars before you even get to take a stroke?

Reflections of a boatbuilder

While killing a little time yesterday waiting for gooey epoxy to become hard enough to *sigh* sand some more, I ran the thick, heavy, neoprene outer chine strips through the shaper to round the top edge. With enough feather boards holding it in place, it went through without a fight.

Then I built a little wooden tunnel to hold it onto the table saw and pulled it through again to cut the 32° bevel on the bottom edge. Again, it worked like a charm. These will get glued to the chine tomorrow.

This morning  I gave the hull its penultimate sanding and a top coat of resin to harden up the fairing. The bottom got a final coat of graphite-laced epoxy. And man alive, is that boat smooth and shiny right now. You can see the white Innegra layer showing through the 10oz glass in a few places. To someone who is used to glass getting translucent when fully saturated, the color is a bit disconcerting. It will all be painted shorty. (After one last light sanding. I need to wean myself.)Yahoo!

Bottom's up

OSHA came by and insisted we post proper signage. Not just slow children. SLOW children.

Meanwhile the SLOW children got the hull faired and sanded, ready for its firm sexy black bottom.

Dennis came by to aid in the massive glassing and we launched into the mix. It's a three layer bottom: a layer of 25oz biaxial glass with 3/4oz mat for excellent adhesion; a layer of the new miracle synthetic Innegra, and a top layer of 10oz glass. Saturated with about two gallons of Resin Research 2040, the resilient epoxy. Just what is Additive F? We still don't know.

 

As long as you don't do it all day every day, glassing can be fun. Well, certainly more fun than sanding glass for hours on end.

Massaging in the corners.

And a flow coat with graphite so she'll slide of those pesky rocks better. Thar she be.