March 29th, 2015

I just read Neil's site and he is making purposeful pod progress. I see that he has inspired another guy to build a boat. Here is my advice to new boatbuilders:

1. Run! If you have already purchased the plans, you can probably get half your money back if you. sell them.
2. Get  someone to help you. Get a therapist. When I decided to build my own house, my designer said "Well, you have a head start; you already have your divorce".
3. Learn to curse.
3. Site selection. Make sure you are far away enough from your neighbors so when you yell "F***" at the top of your lungs, no one will hear you.
4. Get proper tools. The Wharram concept of building on a beach with spit, string and rocks won't work.
5. Have enough money. Calculate the costs to the penny, then triple it!
6. Have enough time. Calculate how much time it will take and triple that, too.
7. Don't set goals. You will only disappoint yourself.
8. Plan on the unforeseen time when you will have to stop building for a while so you can spend the time in the sanatorium. 
9. Site selection #2: Have enough space around your hulls so that when you throw a hammer with all your might you won't hit anything important.
10. Remove those rose tinted glasses from atop your nose. Place them on a decently paved road. Jump on them repeatedly until it's nothing left but a carnage of ground glass and twisted metal. Leave them in the road for the traffic to finish them.
11. Try not to kill everyone who asks "When will the boat be finished?"
12. Read "Attempted Escape from Western Civilization" by Tim & Kingsley Cox. Read this blog if you can stomach it.
13. Learn to love epoxy and being sticky.
14. If you decide to go ahead anyway, never give up. Never, ever give up. Remember, it's nothing but a pile of used plywood and lumber with no value unless it's afloat and at the dock.

15. Smell the flowers.

So, Like Herculeas unchained, we unwrapped the beams to begin anew. This is going to get boring, folks, As we will be doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again.

And like the hounds unleashed, we descended upon them and worked to get them to look like this.  

Each process takes an hour. Gluing the center webs, gluing on the triangle thingies, plane the beams to make them flat, gluing on each board for the top and bott0m. We glued the six top and bottom boards in one session and it took six hours.

Planing to make the tops flat.

Each beam will look like this. It's important you start with precise directions.

So the first beam mostly done, the Texas winds blew it over off the sawhorses demolishing one sawhorse in the process.

These things are heavy! The Texas winds are brisk! So the process is exactly like this: Glue the web, wait a day for glue to dry. Glue the triangular supports, wait a day for the glue to dry. Glue the six  top and bottom boards on, wait a day for the glue to dry.  Each board had to be cleaned up by sanding and wiped down to remove the dust. Gluing the top and bottom layers call for stainless steel annular nails, left in and glued over. Does that mean you use them annually??

We glue on a top board. Screw it down with screws to draw it together, and so the nails won't split the wood, then remove the screws and drive in the nails.

So, the weather is warming up. We see signs of summer approaching. The wildflowers are flowering (see picture somewhere above). The bugs are landing in the epoxy. The roadrunners are wondering through the yard. Ben is making shorts.

We did some other stuff, too. We cut a bunch of support pieces for my beams.

If this blog post seems a bit muddled (wait....it's always muddled), it's because we had a visitor on Saturday and we regaled him with adventures in boatbuilding. After playing the pro from Dover for a week in Houston on a welding job, Ben's good friend, John, stopped in on his return trip to Ohio.

Boat's in there.......................................

The Music ♪: Keola Beamer "Rocking in a Wooden boat"

Let's go fishin'!