Big bent box

The scarf joints came out quite well. A bit of grinding and voila--a 21' side-panel.

Then we clamped it to the boat to mark where it hit the top and bottom of the frames.

Then back on the floor to batten out the cuts into a nice smooth curve.

And cut them, both sides at once. This better be right.

Wait a minute. That's not A nice smooth curve. It's several of them.

 Can't be right. It just can't be.

But it is. Back on the boat.

 Back to the bench to mark and drill all the holes, two sheets at a time.

Back on the boat, with icky sticky pookie and bronze screws.

Side one went on perfectly. Side two let us know that even though the boat was supposed to be symmetrical, the form was not perfect. A bit of laughter, a bit of despair, and we fixed it.

That's last year's mistletoe in the foreground . It doesn't work anymore.

Cutting boards longer

We started out the morning on the lofting table, expanding the transom and bow post and teasing out the elusive bevel cuts. 

We broke into my hoard of old Port Orford cedar planks to mill out the bow post. I still have a couple long, tight, clear 2x8s from some older trees that I acquired with the purchase of the Betty Boop some years back. Especially resinous stuff--the shop smells mighty sweet.

Janek and Zasha spent a while truing up the framework a bit more, and we affixed the transom and bow post. Then we scarf-cut the chines and threw them in the steam bender for an hour or so. Meanwhile, with the majority of lofting done and transferred into the reality of a boat, we disassembled the lofting table, stashed it back under the house, and relegated the lofting diagram to the meat locker (the cold back room) for future reference in creating the decking. By that time the chines were cooked enough to wrangle onto the frames. 

With the north bay free of the lofting table, we pulled out three sheets of plywood to scarf together for one side of the boat. My tried and true circular saw scarfing gizmo has decided it no longer cares to cut straight scarfs, so I free-handed the bevels with my trusty Harbor Freight power planer. Kinda scary, but it works pretty good, actually. Then we laid up the side panel on the floor and wedged them together into what we hope will be flawless scarf joints. Flawless. Well, pretty good, anyhow.

And by then enough time had passed that we could glue up the scarf joints on the bent chines. 

With wet epoxy everywhere it was time to quit and hunker down for tonight's snowstorm. Sounds more like sleet on the tin roof at the moment. Houses are such wonderful things.

Strong back, weak mind

On Thursday we assembled all ten frames. We build them directly on the lofting to insure accuracy. Cricket and Janek built them while I ran around in confused circles

Then we caulked and screwed in the bulkheads. A fine day's work.

Friday I went up to the South Rim of Grand Canyon on a field trip with the AzRA crew. Great fun. We got to tour the newly de-concessioned Desert View Tower. Magnificent. And back to the salt mines this morning. We started by building the strong back and screwing it to the floor.

Then we hung all ten frames on the strongback and began truing them up.

Janek and Zasha are having their way with a problematic frame #4.

We won.

We clocked out at about 5:30, because I didn't have it in me to figure out the bow post and transom cuts today. But at six we were still sitting there staring at it. That happens a lot around here. It's already looking like a boat.

Making sawdust

Enough with the talking about it already. Time to build the goddam boat. This morning we pulled the numbers off the developmental lofting, trying to parse out the boat we want from the other three variations lofted on the same sheet. Then we rolled out a fresh eighteen-foot-long page and started anew. Looks simple, eh? You figure it out.

Once the outlines were lofted we expanded all ten frame sections. Janek and Cricket are drawing out the frame sections here.

Then we actually began cutting wood for real. Clear Port Orford cedar from Oregon that's been air-drying in my loft for three years. Sweet, sweet wood. My poor hobby planer wasn't as excited about the project as we were and gave up the ghost halfway through. We tore into it, hot-wired it and kept on going.

We ended up with ten frame sections with all the bevels cut, ready to assemble.

And twenty-nine pounds of the sweetest shavings you'll ever smell. Thirteen-and-a-half board feet of powder. My friend Heather wants to make some kind of extract or tincture from it. We shall see...

Overarching success, mad scientist, triplets

On Sunday we pulled all the supports and forms from the new bridge, and to no one's surprise, the fifteen ton structure went nowhere. I like it.

Then off to see Judy, my Physical Terrorist. She is trying some wild new shit to help the knees continue their journey to kneedom. Pokey things.

 Pokey things attached to electrodes.

Sucky things. 

A lot of this is just to help the soft tissue of the knees, which was quite content working with a very bowlegged me, wrap its mind around being attached to a straight-legged guy. 10 months out from knee replacement now and I am pretty darned happy with them. Better all the time.

Back at the shop Cricket continues work on BOB2 and BOB3.

 The great aluminum dory gets ready for a trailer ride home with its repaired woodwork.

The triplets. Fraternal, not identical. BOB3 is the closest-- nineteen feet long with a sixty-inch wide bottom. Next is BOB2, same length, but with a 54" bottom. Farthest away is BOB1 at 18'4 with a 54" bottom.

Cricket, Zasha, and I all agreed BOB1 was by far the sexiest looking boat and BOB3 was a bit of a dog. Later over way too many beverages, Dennis, Sarah and I agreed even more emphatically. We all hoped Bruce would pick BOB1.

He did. Final lofting begins tomorrow, then straight into frame building and strong back construction. 

There may be a boat yet

But.. we can't build the boat until we finish up a bit of other nonsense. Like blowing the apartment walls full of horrible pink oobleck.

And pouring the concrete to complete the new bridge. Oh crap It snowed. Which means the shop roof might avalanche right into the wet concrete.

 Roy to the rescue.

Ty, my concrete wizard, clued me in that moving the concrete uphill through the narrow gap between the shop and the woodshed was not something we wanted to do with wheelbarrows and herniated disks. So we called the local man whose machine moves heavier-than-air stuff uphill. His name (no shit) is Orville Wright. God, I love that. Orville pumped all the grout for my shop walls seven years ago.

Here are Orville and Ty swapping lies as we pump almost fifteen tons (about a thousand zorks) of mud into the forms. And it didn't explode. Awesome.

But gray is boring.

Crime scene.

Okay, back to the boatshop. 

This boat we are about to build is to be a scaled up version of the classic Briggs Grand Canyon Dory--the sweetest looking craft to ever run the Colorado. Since I have something along those lines in the shop already--an oversized Briggs-like Aluminum boat--I thought it wise to take the lines off it for comparison. Because, see, if you make a boat, say, 15% wider, it will have proportionately more buoyancy. So the gunwales will rise up higher above the water. So if you also increase the height of the boat the same percentage, your oars may no longer reach the water. Which is problematic. And my head hurts trying to figure out how to figure that out. But this boat has the same bottom width we are shooting for, and a similar profile, and I've rowed it, and it's about right. So I need the point of reference.

We lofted those lines, then used them as a guide to expand the Briggs lines we pulled of Andy's stock Briggs last year. We lengthened the boat 8.5%, widened it 14%, and expanded the heights 11%. Don't ask precisely how I came up with those numbers. We lofted that right on top of the Alumitub lines. Very similar but dramatically different. Then we made a mini-strongback at a 1/10 scale.

And wrapped on a transom and side panels made from an old screwed up panel of veneer I had been saving for way too long.

Then superglued in a mess of cross braces so it could mot change shape and pulled it off the strong back. To our amazement, we got a very pretty, very Briggsy boat. I'd go so far as to call it sexy. It's name is BOB-1, for Big ol' Briggs #1.

We're going to make a slightly longer one (BOB-2) tomorrow and let the owner chose which pleases his eye more.

THEN we'll build a boat.

Oh, but first we have to deconstruct the bridge forms and push a little dirt, and spackle the holes in the apartment walls...