Bilby's Blog

I haven’t been posting much here, as one can tell, but we’re still progressing. I keep meaning to post, but with all the work I’m doing (I’m somewhat overloaded at the moment) I feel horribly guilty whenever I even consider doing something not work related. Neverthless, the garboards - the first two planks - have been laid and shaped. This was pretty exciting. We made a few mistakes, but nothing that will have any bearing on final hull, and we recovered pretty well from all of them. We’ve also drawn up the patterns for the next two planks, and started cutting them out. Next time we get togeather we hope to finish scarfing the planks and join them, giving us the required lengths, and then we can (the following week) lay the next two planks.

So things aren’t going as fast as we hoped, but they’re going.

As an aside, I’ve been thinking of buying a boat to play with while we work on this. Originally I was thinking of getting a Mosquito or a Paper Tiger, as I love sailing beach cats, but I keep falling in love with Dragons. Probably entirly unsuitable for someone of my (extremly limited) skills and needs, being keeled class racing boats, but I just adore their lines and history. Plus, although they aren’t cheap (I could pick up a second-hand Alpha Omega for less) , you can, or so I imagine, use them for daysailing, even taking the family out for an afternoon - although, it should again be admited, they are by no means a pleasure boat. In the end I probably won’t buy anything, and maybe I’ll get around to fixing my old cat, but it would be nice to have a Dragon.

Well, my sister appears to have had one, anyway. A baby, that is. They gave me all the stats that I’m supposed to ask about, but the only meaningful ones were “girl” and “Elizabeth". The others were all these weight and meaurement things.

And thus I now have three nieces. A neat little collection.

Interesting - I just had an automatic upgrade to Firefox 1.5.0.1, and now everything is broken. I’m not overly impressed. Some pages consistantly won’t load, images won’t appear, CSS files (such as the one for the ABC News site) won’t load, and gMail will only work with JavaScript turned off.

I’m not sure about the missing images, but as far as I can tell the problem seems to be a lack of tolerance - if there is a problem in a script or CSS spec, it simply won’t display.

I may yet be forced to “upgrade” to 1.5.

Update: Firefox managed to work first try with Win2000, so I suspect it may be something to do with the WinXP Pro config. Although it is interesting to see how many people are complaining in the forums. This is probably something to be expected with any new release of any software, especially on a support forum, though.

Uni’s been keeping me busy for a while - I’ve been desperately trying to keep up with work, and thus I’ve let this slide for a bit. But this isn’t to say that we haven’t been working on the boat. We have, after all, finally reached the planking stage, and there is some hope that we will one day have a hull. Indeed, luck holding, perhaps we will even have one that floats.

We’re going to need nine (I think) pairs of planks all up. Each plank needs to be assembled (by attaching multiple sheets of plywood end-to-end), cut to shape, and glued to the boat. The first plank is being attached directly to the keelson, while subsequent planks need to be attached almost entirely to the plank which preceded it. This design has no “ribs” to hold the boat’s shape.

As far as we can figure, the aim is balance. There is some flexibility in the shape (although not much) but each pair of planks should match perfectly. So the first task was to cut out a pattern in MDF which we would use to determine the shape of the planks.

As you can see, our model is back.

The next step was to join three lengths of the plywood. An old kitchen table and Simon’s trestle table came in handy. Given the length of these planks, we can’t work in the shed any more - we simply don’t have room. So all work is now outside. This may not seem bad, and indeed it is pleasant, but it means we had better be done with this stage before the rains return.

We’re not 100% happy with the joins (the scarfing), but we are convinced that they are extremely strong. They just don’t look quite as neat as we had hoped. Most people who make these boats for the first time seem to get better at this as the job progresses, so we’re counting on this to improve the appearance of the later (and far more visible) planks. If not, we can give up on the “bright” finish we’re aiming for, and paint the hull instead (again, a common plan amongst first-timers like us). We’re also exploring techniques to improve the next scarfs, and have some good ideas. Nevertheless, at this stage we’re still on track for a bright finish.

Once the plywood was ready, we laid the pattern over it, marked out the shape, and cut it out. (Combine three more sheets of plywood and repeat). Finally, we clamped the two finished planks together and planed them until they matched perfectly. As mentioned, having them match is extremely important.

So that’s where we’re up to. We tried laying the planks across the mould, and were extremely happy with the result. Next time we get to attach them to the boat proper.

Scarfing! At last! Finally, it was time to get the timber ready for planking the hull. Scarfing has been the step which we’ve been the most anxious about (other than building the mast, and we’re still hoping that we know what we’re doing by then). Because the boat is longer than any one sheet of plywood, we needed to join multiple sheets together end-to-end. There are, as discussed previously, at least three options (and I’ve since found a fourth). Butt joints are very simple to do, but sacrifice considerable strength, as there is very little surface area to glue. You can improve their strength by adding another block to the joint, (indeed, this is probably essential), but the thicker joint won’t bend as well as the rest of the final plank. The half-lap joint looks both difficult and not that strong, although it is clearly much stronger than the butt joint. A dovetail joint (along with the finer “finger joint") is easier than the half-lap joint to make and stronger than the butt joint. But the scarf joint is the most common in boatbuilding, and consists of cutting the ends of the plywood sheets at an angle before gluing them together. We had been nervous about this, suspecting that it might be beyond our limited skills, but figured that (at worst) we could always just give it a shot and try something different after we fail.

Anyway, the shed isn’t big enough for both the boat and the plywood sheets, so we decided to work out in the sun. With an additional pair of hands (our brother being down from Melbourne for the weekend), we laid out the timber on some tables and made a quick-and-dirty jig to guide the angle of the cut. Our model was back, and thus she both assisted with setting things up:

and with the positioning of the timber.

(Note: when not in use, all power tools are disconnected from any power source. I’m not quite ready to trust our model with the belt sander). As you can see, she’s getting bigger – she seems to be developing considerably faster than the boat is.

Once things were set up, we started by taking off the edges from the timber with the sander. This was the last time we’ll get to play with it, so we figured that we would try to make good use of the thing. We don’t think that it will be of any use from here anyway, especially given some warnings on mixing power sanders and epoxy.

Once the edges were cleaned up, and the basic shape was there, we got to work with the wood plane.

Even with the beer and three people it was a long(ish) process, but then we weren’t brave enough to try something more radical, and just cut it with a circular saw. I’m not entirely convinced that doing so would be wise. Anyway, it didn’t take anywhere near as long as we had feared, and the whole process proved to be much more manageable (even for people like us) than we had predicted. I suspect that it will be some innocent, tiny little job that will end up biting us, rather these big and seemingly scary ones.

Our guides, we quickly realised, were the layers in the ply - if they were straight, we were doing it right.

Naturally, that picture was of one of the better sections, but overall we were very, very happy with the results. The small amount of feathering was disappointing, but we suspect it won’t be relevant - plus, by scarfing the full sheets, we should have some choice in regard to where to make the final joints, allowing us to pick only the best work. Once we finished one end, we found that the other went a lot quicker - practice is always a good thing.

We won’t be gluing the timber together until we need it, so that was it for the day. Next time we will be laying the first planks on the hull. This should be exciting, and hopefully everything will go well. This day, however, proved to be the most enjoyable so far (in spite of the sunburn), and that is when compared to all of the other, highly enjoyable, days that preceded it. Whether or not the boat comes out as well as we hope, it will certainly prove to have been a very cool project.

We had another couple of good days on the boat in the last three weeks or so. The first, day 11, was the first time we stuck one “boat bit” on to another “boat bit". More specifically, we glued the keelson onto the apron and the transom. This first picture is of the apron being glued to the keelson. The keelson runs along the center of the boat, effectively forming the basis for the boat’s backbone. The apron gives us the shape of the front, or “bow” of the boat. Later, when planking is completed, we’ll be adding more wood to the apron and to the keel, making them a lot stronger. Mind you, it is already impressively strong, as the laminations worked out as well as we could have hoped.

Our biggest problem at this end was in cutting the apron so that it fitted well with the keelson. In the end we don’t think that our angle was perfect (my fault, not Simon’s), but it shouldn’t mean anything. One of the problems we are finding is knowing how much room we have for error – we tend to work on the assumption that we have absolutely none, thus setting rather high expectations and a bit of worry when we fail. In this case, the absolute worst that can happen is that the bow is a tad sharper than we had planned. Fortunately, as you will see, day 12 showed us that any fears were entirely ungrounded.

This second picture is of the transom being attached. The transom is the back, or “stern” of the boat. We had a few options with this, and were very happy with the result. Normally the transom seems to be a single sheet of plywood or several timber planks glued together. To strengthen it the recommendations were to make a frame to attach to the plywood, thickening it slightly. We really wanted to increase the strength, so we went further – gluing two full sheets of plywood together. It’s a tad heavier than normal, but not enough to make any difference, and a lot stronger. Next, from what we gather, the standard approach to attaching the transom to the keelson is to either butt the transom against it (creating a comparatively weak, bit attractive, joint) or to cut a slot in the transom, which creates a stronger joint but looks less attractive. Because we were using two sheets of ply we decided to split the difference – we cut a slot out of one sheet, but left the other whole. We then cut the keelson at the right angle (getting it perfect as well – Simon was doing the cutting) and then glued it and attempted to hold it in place.

That’s where everything went bad. Because the angle was so good, the keelson was mostly held in place by pressure from the transom. We had planned to finish the job by using a Spanish windlass to apply downwards pressure. But the rope we used was awful, and kept breaking. There was no way we could see of clamping it fast enough, and attempts to brace it failed. So in the end we had to swallow our pride and use a single screw to hold it in place. This is in no way a bad thing, but we’d hoped to try and avoid using them as much as possible, so this felt a lot like surrendering. Still, once it is removed, the hole filled, and the planks put down, no-one will ever know, and the joint will be as strong as we were hoping.

Other than some attempts at shaping the keelson that was it for the day. The hard work was mostly on day 12.

On day 12 we had to start shaping (or, I believe, “fairing") the keelson. Taking Paul’s advice, I’d gone looking at hand planes the week before. Unfortunately, the ones I could afford I didn’t trust, and the ones I did trust I couldn’t afford. One thing this project is teaching us is the importance of good tools. Our original jigsaws, for example, both died, and the replacement one (which cost more than both combined) is so good that it is an absolute delight to use. So rather than buy something cheap and nasty I’m going to hold out for a couple more weeks until I can find something really nice. Instead, Simon spent some time sharpening his plane (it’s a cheap one, but we already had it and figured it was worth the shot), and we got to work with that. The eventual procedure was to take off a chunk of the wood with the belt sander (a tool we borrowed from a cabinet maker), and then to get to work with the plane. Simon took the bow and I took the transom. However, I soon discovered that not only was Paul right that a hand plane was needed, but he was also right that they are great to use. So I ended up spending a couple of hours shaping my section almost entirely with the hand plane, simply because I loved using it so much. I’m so looking forward to buying a new one. The result, as you can see, was well worth the effort. (The screw is still visible, but will be removed and the hole filled next time).

One recommendation from the book we’re using was that we should cut guides into the keelson so that we know how much to take off. This too worked really well (when finished they were entirely gone).

Finally, Simon’s work on the bow was at least as good as mine on the stern. We may still shape it a tad more next week, but we’re very happy with how it is going.

Thus we’re ready to start worrying about planking! This is very exciting – we probably won’t be able to lay a plank for a couple of weeks (we still need to scarf the timber and make the pattern), but when we do it will probably be time for a small celebration.

We both really loved the work on day 12 – it was hard, but we felt that we had achieved a lot, and made some real progress. I can finally start to understand why people would choose to spend their lives building boats.

The claimed 10th planet in our solar system, which has the formal name of “2003 UB313″, now has the informal title of “Xena". This is cool. But nowhere near as cool as reports that it also has a moon called “Gabrielle". From the ABC News article:

“Having a moon is just inherently cool - and it is something that most self-respecting planets have, so it is good to see that this one does too.”

Additional information is available from http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/moon/index.html.

Based on some excellent advice, I’m off to look at hand planes tonight.

And thus we hit double figures. I was wondering today about how I’ll feel when we hit triple figures - it certainly isn’t inconceivable that we may still be going after two years. Mostly because a “day” rarely means a full eight hours, and normally refers to two or three hours grabbed on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

At any rate, Day 9 had nothing to do with me. We went out in the morning to have a look at a boat for sale (a nice steel 38 footer), and thus I wasn’t able to do anything that weekend. Fortunately Simon was. The main aim was to get the two parts of the transom glued. Simon did a superb job. As you can see, he used all of the clamps and a couple of buckets of water to hold it togeather. The results were perfect.

Thus Day 10 had us playing with the now complete inner stem and transom. The inner stem had also worked out well. While the laminations were anything but tidy, yet they responded well to some trimming with the circular saw. We’re quite happy with the result.

We looked into joining the inner stem and the transom to the keelson, but decided that this had best wait a week or two. Mostly because we now need to shape the keelson - it needs to be cut back to the correct angle. We started by marking (with a saw) the angle to cut it to.

That was the only thing that went well, though. Taking it back to that angle was somewhat problematic. We tried a hand plane, but it barely took of any wood at all (probably because it was blunt). The electric plane fared better, but we still figured we were looking at several years work. We tried the spoke shave, and that gave the best results - months instead of years (it may be that buying the cheapest available wasn’t wise). Eventually we decided on three options. Option 1: use a belt sander. Option 2: use a jigsaw to take off the bulk of the wood, and a plane or sander to finish it off. And Option 3: buy a decent plane and learn how to use it. As Option 3 involves no tech per se (or at least doesn’t fit with my power tool fetish), and as Option 2 seems prone to serious errors, we’re going to give the first option a shot. When it fails we shall re-evaluate our choices.

Still, we always expected these situations. Given our complete lack of knowledge we figured that we’d blunder our way through them. Just so long as we keep our errors from being too expensive, we can probably live with this. And in the meantime, part of the point of blogging this was to be honest about what we encounter, in case someone in a similar position wants to give boat building a go. So I feel the need to report the foolish problems.

Much to report! I spent a couple of hours just playing with 3D primatives (triangles and rectangles) until I felt I had the hang of them, then moved on to playing with the rotation function. I’m pretty happy - I honestly feel like I can do something now. I then got stuck - for hours - on texture mapping, as I wanted to get it to work without employing glaux, which I’m told isn’t popular anymore. It should have been easier, but my lack of knowledge got in the way. Anyway, I finally managed this as well. Next stop: advanced textures (mipmaps), a deeper understanding of lighting, blending, and, if I can, loading meshes. I’m also trying to pull information from as many resources as I can, so I don’t just end up copying out a tutorial.

I have always had a rather bad habit when it comes to programming - I get horribly bored working through the basics, and immediatly want to run off and tackle advanced stuff. Today was no exception. The basics of C++ looks pretty much like I expected. Normal data types, the normal set of logical constructs, and so on. Thus I decided to start playing with OpenGL.

This was a mistake. I was able to get a window to appear fairly quickly, but all of the test code I could find failed to work. Eventually I managed to track down the problems. The drivers I had installed for my video card were stuffed (or so it seems), and I wasn’t loading the correct libraries. Indeed, I didn’t realise that I had to explicitly load libraries in the project settings. It took about an hour to track down the problems, which was frustrating when I consider that someone who knew what they were doing would have been able to spot them right away.

In the end, I had a degree of success, and I’m moderatly happy with my progress. Using the basic code from Neon Helium’s OpenGL tutorial, I’ve been able to open a window, including in fullscreen mode, draw a brightly-coloured 3D pyramid, and have it rotate slowly in space. I understand all the code when I read it through, so I’ve met the rules so far, but at this point I feel that I should spend a day or two just playing with what I’ve done. So I plan to rewrite the code my way, and to play with the various functions until I really grasp what is they are all doing. Then, luck holding, I can move into more exciting stuff, like alpha transperancies and texture mapping.

This doesn’t seem quite as impossible a task as I had expected. But I probably just haven’t hit the bad stuff yet.

I have a new project. I have decided to learn to program in C++. I have 30 days (spread out over a couple of months) in which to go from my current level of complete ignorance to a point where I have developed an acceptable (albeit still rough) 3D game. It is an experiment of sorts - if I can do this, given my complete lack of knowledge of C++, then I can imagine that students with some C++ knowledge could do the same. The rules:

1. No formal textbooks can be used. Only online resources.
2. Although I may get desperate, I can’t seek help from a real human until I am really, really desperate.
3. The game should be playable.
4. I am not permitted to use a game engine of any sort.
5. I must understand what I’m writing - copy-and-paste from websites is not sufficient (even though it may be necessary).
6. If I feel the urge to follow formal practicals (especially those offered for courses we teach) I can’t look at answers, under any circumstances, until I get my own version to run.

When I finish I intend to do the same job using a game engine in order to form a direct comparison between the two approaches.

So for day 1 I set out to create a “Hello World” program. This seems trivial, but it was not to be as simple as I had initially thought. Mostly because I didn’t have an appropriate IDE. I initially tried using Visual Studio.NET 2003. I was an idiot. I should know by now that .NET languages are not the same as their source languages, so instructions written for C++ will probably not work for C++.NET. I did get a .NET version running, but this wasn’t the intent. So rather than use Visual Studio 6.0 (which I don’t have on hand), I went for Dev C++. It is an ugly, but highly functional, IDE, and thus meets all of my requirements. It’s also free - I love free software. With this I managed to get Hello World running.

Feeling creative, I decided to try “cin” to get some simple console-based input going. This also worked. I went with a String rather than an array of chars to store the input, though. I’m not sure if this is the normal approach, but who cares. (I mention this because a course we offer here - C++ for Java - employed the array of chars solution, but I didn’t, as per the rules, look until after I got my version working).

Overall, I’m happy with the first day. The last time I looked at C++ I didn’t know Java. This time, having a reasonably solid grasp of OO programming (I do teach it after all), everything made sense. It doesn’t look like C++ will be a great challenge in itself, although I suspect that the game will be.

Due to various factors we were unable to work on the boat for a couple of weeks. On the plus side, this meant that the laminations on the inner stem had plenty of time to set. Simon couldn’t resist taking it off the mould during this period, so when I arrived it was loose and very impressive. The laminations are strong, it didn’t stick to the mould (fortunately my packing tape worked) and the shape was almost perfect. I say almost as it did straighten slightly, but this was predicted. The only problem was that the lack of clamps holding the inner stem down on to the mould meant that there was a lot of epoxy underneath. Again, this was predicted - we were planning to trim it back to an appropriate width, which should also fix this problem, and when we did try clamping it down we found that the wood warped.

Thus we spent the first half of day 8 adding the next six layers to the inner stem, which should (all going well) suffice for the boat. We had also planned to then use the inner stem as a mould for producing the outer stem. This plan has since been dumped, as the nice people at Duck Flat said that we should expect the inner stem to change shape slightly when we build it into the boat, and therefore we should wait until the planking is done before making the outer stem. Sound advice is always much appreciated.

The other job for the day was building the transom. There are four methods (that we are aware of) for doing this. The first is to build the entire thing out of planks of timber - a fine idea, but perhaps a tad too much like work. The next is to build it out of a single sheet of plywood. This seems ok, but we were concerned that it would be too thin to support an outboard. We want a sail boat, but the option of hooking up a small outboard for some fishing is too hard to resist. The next option is to use a sheet of plywood, but to then add to that a frame giving it more strength. The final choice, and the one we went with, is to cut out two sheets of plywood and epoxy them together, giving a solid (if slightly heavy) stem.

So that’s it for this week. Apparently Simon has now ordered the timber for the hull, so in a couple of weeks things should really begin to take shape. Presuming, of course, that we finish the current jobs in a timely manner.

I hadn’t worried about covering day 6, simply because we had so little to show for it, in spite of completing a lot of work. The major task on day 6 was to repair the stations - as discussed, the slot for the keelson was too shallow in two of the nine stations, so we had to remove them and deepen the slots. But most of the day was spent preparing - we played with the bench router (a lot), measured up the hole for the centerboard, built most of the heatbox for the epoxy resin, and generally set things up for day 7.

Thus when day 7 came around we were all set to go. I’d finished the heatbox for the epoxy during the week - the box was made on day 6, but I wired up the light on the morning of day 7. The result was a neat little box that should warm up the epoxy to a consistancy that makes it easy to apply. It also has a pleasant glow, and I added a hole in the middle so that the epoxy itself will light up at night. Not a complex task, but I’m please that it worked out.

With the epoxy now ready the big task for the day was to start building the apron or “inner stem". The apron will become half of the bow of the boat, with the stem (or “outer stem") to be attached later. We’d set up the mould for it the week before, so things were ready to go.

First, because we didn’t want the mould to be stuck to the apron, we covered the whole thing in packing tape. I’ll let you know if it worked or not next time.

This complete, we then layered massive amounts of epoxy onto each strip of wood. The epoxy/hardener ratio is 2:1, and we found that we needed between 6 and 8 squirts of the epoxy (with between 3 and 4 squirts of hardener) to do one strip of wood.

The wood that we are working with is hoop pine. To create the apron we’ll need about 12-14 strips of timber. To make things easier, we only used 6 or so strips - next time we’ll finish the layers. Once all the strips were coated and ready, we bent them around the frame and clamped them into place.

We have been using the motto “you can never have too many clamps” when building this boat. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough, so we did what we could with what we had. It will take a week for the epoxy to set, and we probably won’t be able to play for another week after that, so it should be nice and solid when we start adding the second set of strips.

Our final task was to cut the hole for the centerboard in the keelson. This was our first experience of using the bench router on the boat. As you can see, it worked out quite well - perhaps not as neat as we had hoped, but nothing that a bit of sanding can’t fix.

Day 5 proved to be one of the more rewarding days - we finally finished (temporarily, anyway) building the mould! I mention the “temporary” part as we have since discovered that we need to take it apart to fix some small errors, but it felt like we had acomplished something, anyway.

The almost-complete mould is the frame over which we build the boat. The picture below shows (I hope) what I mean: each station is the shape that the hull will have at that point in the boat, so by laying the planks along the stations they can be made to hold their final shape.

(Note the wood laminate which gives it that real 70’s feel.) To give an idea of scale, the picture stars Belinda, as our usual model was sleeping. This second picture shows the mould holding the keelson - the first part of the boat proper to be tried on it.

Ok, so what did we do wrong this week? The big mistake is, if understand it correctly, with the depth of the slot into which the keelson is placed - it is a tad too shallow on some of the early stations. Being too shallow is an acceptable error, though, as it means that all we need to do is unscrew three stations and cut it a tad deeper. Perhaps about 20 minutes work. Thus this doesn’t really destroy the sense of acomplishment we have at having reached this first milestone.

Next, we need to cut the slot in the keelson for the centerboard, attach it, and start work on both the transom (the back of the boat) and the stem (the front). Hopefully we can at least start this on day 6.

I stuffed up. I had included photos with the previous two posts, but my HTML was malformed. Firefox showed them correctly, but IE couldn’t cope. A tad embarrassing when you’re teaching World Wide Web Development.

Anyway, I fixed everything, so they should be visible. Day 5 will be up tomorrow.

Day 4 happened to coincide with the Woodworking Festival, so we went along to admire the tools. Simon was seriously taken by a bench router, and I admired the desktop belt sanders, the CRC Milling Machine (naturally), and pretty much anything that looked exceedingly dangerous that I didn’t understand. Duck Flat Wooden Boats were in attendance, and they had brought along a “stretched” Gannet. The Gannet is another Iain Oughtred design and is much like the Fulmar. The Fulmar is technically a tad longer, but as this boat was stretched by 12% the difference in length was insignificant. This Gannet was beautifully built with a full deck, stacks of storage and a gaff rig. We’re still debating what rig we’ll employ, but this one looked excellent. The other current big debate is whether or not we should go for the heavier but very traditional deck, or stick with the lighter “boyancy chambers only” in the Fulmar’s official design. We also spent some time examining how the different builders had joined the plywood pieces that made up the hull - the boat we had inspected a couple of weeks previously had simply butted joints, a hull on display at the show had used dovetails, and the Gannet used scarfing. At the moment we plan to give scarfing a shot.

We came away from the show with a combination table saw/bench router (Simon’s purchase), a bench belt/disk sander and a spokeshave (my purchases). It was fun.

When we got back to the shed everything was ready to go. Simon had finished tracing the patterns during the week, and we had five patterns glued onto the chipboard.

With two jigsaws it only took a (noisy) hour or so to cut them out and attach the first two to the frame. As things stand, we have 7 of the nine stations cut out and ready to go, with the final two glued and waiting for next week. Only two things went wrong - my jigsaw died, and we realised that we’de stuffed everything up. Because most of the stations (2-9) had extra space, we just pasted them on the board and cut them out, ready to attach to the frame. To attach them we screwed on a length of pine, which is then screwed on to the frame itself. This should make everything solid, and makes sure that they are all positioned at the correct height.

However, station 1 had no extra space. Thus the pine we use to connect it to the frame will get in the way when we try to attach the final plank. We can’t lift it above the pine either, as that would put it out of sync with the rest of the stations. We have some (ugly) solutions in mind, the main one being to extend the station a bit and bolt it to the bottom of the frame, but we wish we’d thought of this earlier. Still, at least we’re confident that we can fix it. And I’d rather spot (and fix) the problem now than in five or six months when it becomes critical.

The only problem left for next week is the transom. The transom also needs to be cut out, but as this is part of the actual boat we’re not confident that the tracing and gluing method will be wise.

Fortunately, I’ve recently visited a site where the owner describes building an Acorn. The Acorn is another Oughtred design, and uses most of the same techniques as the (considerably larger) Fulmar. Anyway, on the site the builder describes how he lofted the patterns, so I’m thinking we might give his method a shot.

So that’s it - I’ve finally caught up.

I’d planned to write about Day 3 last week. Unfortunately, the start of a new semester means the loss of any free time, so I ended up delaying things until now. Time to catch up.

We lost a week or so waiting for wood (or “timber", as Simon insists on describing it). The wood finally arrived and was quite exciting. We got 4 massive pieces of chipboard to build the stations, a sheet of western red cedar plywood for the transom, some strips of hoop pine for the stem, and a long plank of western red for the keelson.

So day 3 saw us running around as we tried to figure out how to copy (loft?) the paterns for the stations onto the chipboard. Fortunately, sometime during the previous week I’d read (and I wish I knew exactly where) that you could photocopy the plans, glue them to the chipboard, and cut it out following the lines. This seemed rather clever to us. So we picked up some tracing paper, traced the full-sized plans, glued the paper down, cut the shape out with the jigsaws, and sat back to admire our handiwork. It was slow, so we only finished two of the nine stations that day, but it worked well.

It was, however, one of the more frustrating days - it was good to see that we did something, but the running around all morning, visiting hardware stores and art supply shops, meant that we didn’t make the progress which we had planned. Still, there is always day 4.

Technically, this probably isn’t day 2. Since the last time I commented on our progress, we have spent a day measuring and purchasing wood, and another watching someone else laminate a part for his boat. Watching it being done in person was extremely useful - I suspect we’ve saved a few hours that would otherwise have been spent fixing errors.

Nevertheless, this is day 2 of actual building. This time we had to take the two long planks we put togeather on day 1 and build a solid frame out of them. The biggest challenge was removing the slight twist in the planks and making sure that the final frame was as square and as level as we could make it. We assembled the entire thing upside down, adding beams at both ends, several struts across what will become the underside of the frame, and some temporary struts to what will become the top. These will be replaced later when we build the mold onto the completed frame. This picture shows Simon hard at work attaching one of the struts. Note the excellent and very shiny drill being employed - that was a birthday present to me from him, and I allowed him, on occasion, to hold it. A most excellent drill.

Once completed, we (very nervously) turned the whole thing over. The completed frame:

has proven to be much better than we expected. It is perfectly level, flat and square - everything that we had hoped for but feared we wouldn’t be able to do. We made it slightly narrower than we first planned, but this shouldn’t be a problem - the important thing seems to be to make sure that it is narrow enough for bolting the transom into place, but not so narrow as to become unstable. At just over a metre in width I suspect that we’ve found a good balance.

Next we need to start building the mold on to the frame. At this stage we’re planning to use chipboard, which we will need to pick up next week. Luck holding, I expect it to only be another three days of work before we can have the mold complete and be ready to start on the boat proper. We shall see.

Finally, as a means of measuring how long it takes to complete this project, I’ve taken a photo of Simon’s daugher with the completed frame. As the boat progresses we should see her getting bigger. I’m hoping that she isn’t in high school (or worse yet, university) by the time we’ve finished.

Apparently, I am now 36.