Happy Father's Day!
I took advantage of this being my first father's day, and the arrival of my mother-in-law (who wanted nothing more than to sit with her grandson) to disappear into the basement for a few hours to work on the boat. There were a number of little errands to do before starting the planking, namely beginning to pull the insulation from the ceiling (we had some guests who had made a home in it), and cleaning up the dust and debrit. I aslo needed to clean the glue off the stems and smooth them out, and bevel them so the planks would lie flat against them. Naturally, that all required a trip to the hardware store - doesn't everything? Now I have my first good respirator to keep some of the toxic dust out of my lungs. It's amazing how it's comfortable to wear - and doesn't fog up my glasses like the cheap ones do.

I also had to fasten the molds to the board (in the earlier photo they were just standing there). And I put blue masking tape on the edges so that I don't glue the planks to the molds. Truth is, that i tacked the first mold in place before I remembered about the tape. Fortunately, the first plank isn't glued in so i was safe. In this shot you can see the first plank on either side. I was a little surprised there's a bit of a concave curve - but I double checked everything, and I think it's just the nature of this canoe - it's above the water line and in the stern so I'm not worried. The bow doesn't have it - it would be a bigger deal there. Other than that, the molds appear very fair (smooth curve from one to the next. I did however, see that there will be some interesting twist to the planks near the bottom...we shall see.

I like this shot because you can see how small the boat will be - that's a bottle of wood glue sitting in the middle there.

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

Here we go again.

This weekend Katy and Bobby were away in NYC so I snuck into the basement and began work on another boat. This one is a wee lassie, http://www.feathercanoes.com/ a featherweight canoe, that I hope will be a good tender to the caledonia yawl www.roger.coulter.net.

I began by reading the book several times. Then I began with a building board (or strongback) made from theleftover lumber from tent frame over the caledonia yawl project. I bought a 1/2" sheet of particle board and ripped it into three 16" strips, then Erin and I drew lines vertically down the strips at every inch to transfer the patterns. We cut the patterns out, then spent half a day making sure they were as close to symetrical as possible. I cut up an old coat rack to get the cleats that hold the molds up. We discovered a few errors and omissions in the book. First, the plans say how far appart to space the molds, but the sum of all the distances didn't equal the total length, so after some theorizing we decided that the missing length was exactly equal to what was needed to make one odd-ball spacing equal to the spacings on either side. So the space between station 1 and 2 was 20", the spacing between 2 and 3 was 17 3/4 and the spacing between 3 and 4 was 20". Overall we were 2 1/4 short, so by adding it to the 17 3/4" station we got 20 inches - just like the ones on either side. The other funny little omission is that he doesn't actually say how thick the stem is supposed to be, but I was able to figure out it should be 1/2" because there's a 1/2" gap between the stem mold and the first station.

So enough with the tribulations. I went to my favorite lumber yard, Crosscut Hardwoods to pick up some cedar for the planking and they didn't have any - the manager said something about hardwoods and I realized Cedar is a softwood - not surprising they don't have it! He recommended another place and I'll head out this week to pick it up. In the mean time, I went to Dunn Lumber and picked out some spruce for the stems. I asked if he had any clear spruce (without knots) and he laughed and said Spruce is known for having a lot of knots. I deserved that. Anyway, I picked out a good board with flat grain (so that when I ripped it vertically I'd get vertical grain) and all the knots were on one side so I knew I could get a lot of clean strips.

We changed the blade on my table saw to a thin blade so I wouldn't waste much wood and started cutting paper think strips 1/16 of an inch thick and about 8 feet long. It's an interesting challenge. If you get just a little off, you can taper the strip off altogether. The other interesting challenge is that the tablesaw just scares the living snot out of me. So easy to lose a finger or have the wood kick back and knock you in the ribs. But I suppose a healthy bit of fear is a good thing - it's when you get careless that things go wrong.

We got cut up about 12 strips - which was more than enough and then cut them down to 32" lenghts and glued them together around the stem molds with ordinary wood glue - which is so much more pleasant to work with than epoxy! It washes off with water for one, and doesn't smell bad either. The whole boat will be encased in epoxy and fiberglass later so these joints don't need to be water-tight.