Sleagh gh gh!

Cedar dust!

Friday I went to Issaquah Cedar - a lumber yard that only carries cedar! Whew, does that smell nice! They only had western red cedar - no alaskan yellow. I was hoping to buy one board in yellow for a stripe, but I did find four very light boards and one very dark board - all nearly perfect -- I think there was one knot. They were also flat grained - which normally isn't as good because it tends to warp. Flat grained wood has wider spacing in the grain and usually some big U shapes in the grain. You get flat grain by cutting a tree on the chord, not through the center. If you cut the plank perpendicular to the center (on a radius) you get vertical grain - which is much better for boatbuilding. So I got these big flat grained boards, but I'm cutting them into 1/4" strips. So the new long side is the 3/4" that used to be the thickness of the larger boards. When you do that, you get vertical grain on the strips - which is just what I wanted. Neat huh? The boards were unbelievably light - I'm used to hardwoods that probably weigh 8 times as much so when I went to pick up these boards it was almost spooky how light they felt.

At the books' direction, I put a small 7 1/4" round extra thin blade on my table saw to reduce the waste from all the cutting. Even so, there's a pile 4" deep under the saw, and since cedar dust is incredibly light, the pile covers, well, the whole basement, the inside of my ears, the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling in the basement... It turns out that cedar dust is pretty bad for you - the same characteristics that make it rot-resistant make it bad to breath so we were careful to wear masks and get out of the basement as soon as we were done. I was planning on using a router to cut beads and coves (cutting a U into one edge and rounding the other so they fit together as I lie them around the rounded hull) on the strips so they'd fit together well, but I couldn't find the router bits so I'll have to do it the hard way - planing them individually to fit together.


The strips went pretty quickly - I'm still scared to death of the table saw, but with these long straight cuts the risk was negligible and we were very safe - using push sticks and finger boards to manage the boards. A finger board is a plank with a series of cuts in the end so it looks like a fork with a bunch of tiny tines. The tines are kind so springy so you can push it sideways and give even pressure. Finally, I picked out two particularly dark strips, and one light strip and glued them together. The next morning I ran teh saw down the middle creating two strips with stripes (dark, light, dark). I'll put one on each side of the boat to give it a little decoration. You can see the darker strips (and the striped strips) on the left side of the picture.

Next week we'll move the building board and molds back in place and start stripping the boat!

R