Quick Update

Haven't been posting much because I figured stories of me drawing line after line on sheets of ply would bore everyone. I've just been trying to get a little bit done every day after work. I've finally finished, and I'm hoping I'll have everything cut out tomorrow. Then the fun will really begin. One cool option on the FS18 is the ability to make the chine on the front 7 feet of the boat rounded. A hard chine above the waterline tends to trap all the little wavelets when your poling into the wind, creating hull slap. This usually isn't a big deal, but when you're in 6" of water the noise can spook fish before you get a shot at them. The only thing that will fully eliminate hull slap is a submerged chine, but a rounded one can help. This option requires the first couple frames to be rounded on the corners that define the chine, and that's what is shown below.

This is the foward-most frame in the boat after rounding the bottom corners. Aslo, I'm now a Bosch convert. I bought the RO sander before I started because I heard that if you could only buy one decent tool, make it the sander. When my mom heard I was building a boat, she was told that I needed a good jigsaw and bought it for me. The sander is great (I'm sure I will hate to even look at it by the end of the build), but the jigsaw is fantastic. It feels like a sewing machine. It makes the Skil jigsaw that I bought seem like a hunk of crap. I guess a more accurate assessment would be that using it makes me realize the Skil IS a hunk of crap. I'm sure some of the other high end stuff is just as good or better, but these are good enough to be wasted on me. I'll have to work up to them.

Expect more updates this weekend. Hope to make some progress.