Batten a thousand

Well, we got the battens cut out and scarfed together so we can fair the ribcage. But the big pain today was trying to figure out how to extract the triangular chines from my oak 2x4s. They are isosceles triangles, with the angles being 38°, 38°, and 104°. How to get more than one out of a 2x4? Here is what I came up with:

The scary thing was trying to make these giant angular cuts through solid oak on my table saw and actually making cuts one and two meet in the middle. Somehow it worked. Cuts three and four were not quite as scary, but still, I kissed my table saw afterward. Oh brave and mighty machine. If anyone has a use for 36 feet of the very odd-shaped scrap material that came out of this cut, let me know. It's still a lot of oak.

Scarfing the two nine-foot chines together was an epic as well but somehow that worked as well.

Gaylord Staveley, Norm Nevills's son-in-law, stopped in this afternoon. What a treat. He has spent a lot of his life digging around river history, Nevills in particular. We had a good bull session on the various mysteries of how Nevills actually figured out how to build these things. Here are Gaylord and nephew Greg in Moe's cockpit.

A preliminary glance at the batten curves tonight convinced me that we are really pretty close. Tomorrow we'll see just how close.