Getting Busy

It was a long day today, but some significant progress was made.....on the actual boat this time!! The better part of the morning was spent laying out the patterns for the deck and frames on the 3/8" sheets of ply. With the Bateau.com plans there is no complicated lofting. All of the panels are cut from flat stock and all the measurements are contained in the plans. Simply draw them out on the ply.

Curves are drawn by bending a flexible batten around finish nails driven into measured points on the ply.

Since they'll be showing up in pictures, I figure it's probably about time that I introduce my build crew:

On the left is Frank of canoe strongback fame. His cedar strip canoe is coming along nicely, but he couldn't work on it today because he's waiting for the epoxy to fully cure. Building my boat would be the next logical place to be. On the right is Cole of redfish face-rocking fame. Frank is helping out due to his all around obsession with boats. Cole, my regular fishing partner, is helping out due to his obsession with more effeciently rocking redfish faces. Both motives I can understand and appreciate.

Anyway, back to the build. In order to have something to cut the panels on, we went ahead and enlarged the strongback to support the decks of the FS18. Basically, its shape now crudely follows that of the boat and is wide enough to keep everything from drooping.

It's now shaped like a coffin. This pleases Cap'n Gnarly. It also varies less 1/16" in height over it's 16 foot run, so we're in biz for the next step.

Once the patterns are laid out on the ply, we place them on top of a sheet of blue insulation foam and start cutting. We used a borrowed cordless circular saw for this. It's weak, runs out of batteries and the blade sucks, but its small diameter makes it well suited to cutting the sweeping curves in the panels. It gives a fairer curve that a jigsaw would.

Can you tell I was crawling around on the floor earlier? I won't show you a closeup of this cut because it looked like hell. Unfortunately, this saw's blade kicks sawdust to the front, obscuring the line right before you get to it. This makes cutting a little bit like randomly running a saw around on a real expensive sheet of plywood. We did come up with a very sophisticated solution, however.

Cole blew the dust out of the way with the shopvac, while I cut. While completely bootleg, it worked great. This whole cutting process went on for a great deal of time and we were able to get all the deck, frames and transom pieces cut out of the 3/8" ply. We laid out the deck pieces to make sure our strongback would work and you can now kind of get an idea of what the deck layout will be.
Just seeing the boat-like arrangement of the deck pieces it exciting. I can't wait to start wrapping hull panels. My shoddy cutting actually cleaned up pretty well in about 15 minutes with a new block plane that I bought. It's my new favorite tool. The next step will be to repeat the same process with all of the 1/4" panels. It takes longer than expected, but I hope to be slinging epoxy by next weekend. We'll see.

The Captain got a new place to rest his weary bones today too. A test piece from when I was playing around with my trial epoxy kit just happened to fit him perfectly, so we attached it to the wall.

He can now more easily survey our work and rain down insults regarding both our craftsmanship and manhood. I'm beginning to think that the Captain's ships were not very cool places to work. He was definitely not impressed with my cutting today.