No adult supervision

See....
The problem is that Jim comes by, and we're both bachelors with a tendency to go off the rails, especially when we're in bad company.

Things started out really well. Our scarf joints from yesterday came out wonderfully. So we went ahead and began cutting the new inner chines out of the giant megaboard that Crazy Allen Wilson made me strap to my car in Oregon this summer and bring home. Sweet, holy, yummy Port Orford Cedar.

But that long line of magical sawdust got us headed the wrong way.

Okay. Stop. Go outside. Fire up the steam bender to make the new chines suffer that ridiculous bend of Betty Boop's prow. Except that they are eleven-foot boards in a nine-foot steamer. Hmmm. No problems. Strap a river bag on the end.

But watching the steam boil out, and the drip, drip, dripping of the condensate out the far end made us get bad Port Orford thoughts again. By god, it's a still!

Then the wheels really came off. The rotted shrapnel of the original floor looked so much like a shrine that we had to follow through with the concept.

But this was good. We had somewhere to pray for the chine boards to actually bend without exploding.

It sorta worked. But shoving the cooked, bent boards in and out of the wicked bend seemed to be causing them a lot of stress. So we figured we'd just shove them in once and trim them in place. Very professional. Here is Jim cutting the precise 8:1 scarf in mid air. I've already screwed the far end in place. Don't try this at home.

Cut to guess, grind to fit.

Well, okay, before we got our prayers right we did have one teeny weeny explosion. But the board broke at such a radical diagonal we decided to call it a scarf joint and glued it back together in place with a magic potion to help it heal.

At day's end, things looked pretty good. Yesterday the old rotten bottom was still in place. Tonight all the rot is gone or stabilized, and by morning it will be ready to put the new bottom on. Oh yeah--when we weren't snorting Port Orford shavings or distillate, we redesigned my DUH scarf jig and scarfed up a new half-inch bottom. Betty Boop's gonna be a boat again.

 

The candles must be working.