Thumb Spikes Psych A Gripe For The Types That Build Boats ......Yikes!

I just got a tip from the this website on how to increase readership. It says:

Have at least 10 other sites link to yours (Coming soon: pornography links!)

Our top sites receive many visitors because they have unique, valuable content. (Ummmmm, nope)

Add content regularly (maybe too much)

Make your site readable: The best Weebly sites are readable and don't exceed the 6th or 7th-grade reading level (Me Tarzan, You Jane.....I feel better already).

Oh man I'll never get anyone to read this crap. Hey, That's my contribution to the world. Driving away illiterates!

For the better part of a month, I have had this splinter in my thumb. I dug at it with needles and tweezers to no avail. I bandaged it and kept it irritated by wiggling it around. Finally the body did it's work. It festered around the splinter allowing it to come out when I scraped the top off and squeezed it. It had gone straight in and stayed there. This meranti plywood is some splintery stuff. It's quite a relief to not have to baby that hand again. 

Budge worked on electrical panels. Here he is shrink wrapping the terminals

These panels go inside the battery box between the batteries. They are the main feed and cut off switches that will feed both hulls. Circuit breakers protect the system.

I glued together 9 bowed boards, one a day for 9 days. These are for the pod seat back and pod top. I also glued up two straight boards for the pod top ends. The temperature hit 95 degrees, 35 kilometers in metric. Budge and I have a new mantra (Take that, 6th graders): "If we do it today, we won't have to do it tomorrow". It works! We drag ourselves out there and do just one more little thing. I try to stay out there until 6:00 PM, then take my walk. Yes I know what a kilometer is....

I placed the final boards of the fore decks in place. I didn't screw them in. We will do that in the final assembly. The plans say to fan the boards out to accommodate the curve of the hull. We kept the spacing uniform and made wedge shaped boards to fill the gaps. I like it better.

Oh, man a whole bunch of pictures. OK, here's what we did for the pod aft seat back. The pictures are all jumbled. Hell, ​I'm all jumbled.
​
We took a piece of 4 mm plywood cut to the correct size and screwed it to the pod seat to maintain the curve

We glued two curved laminated boards on to the plywood in situ to again, maintain the curve. One along the top, one along the center.

When the epoxy was set, we removed the back and glued a third board along the bottom.

We glued some vertical upright pieces between the 3 bowed boards.

We glued a second piece of plywood over the curved boards to form a stress skin panel.

Budge glued a couple side supports to the pod for the end supports.

We glued the seat back at the bottom and sides to the pod. Budge filleted the seat back in.

We still have another support to glue above the seat back.

Budge's big block project. He is working on placement of controls in the pod. The motor controls, he discovered, went past the horizontal position so he had to elevate them somehow. He also needed to cover the future steering control lines from the wheel to the deck. The lines we decided to run through a piece of 4" PVC plumbing pipe. He needed a flange (uh oh, lost another 6th grader) at the top and bottom to hold the pipe. A big dig through the scrap been produced some ply lamination cut offs. They were thick blocks that he has to end grain glue edge to edge and put a piece of ply over it to reinforce the joint. These pieces are not structural, so this worked fine. He cut the shapes on the band saw and cut the centers out with band saw and 4 1/2" hole saw. Basically he ended up with the three pieces he needed. He had to tweak the motor control block some more. He cut the top at an angle so the controls would tilt back slightly.

I am putting a small table together  for my living area. Some scrap pine, Baltic birch top, and legs from the neighbor's garage sale. A side to the side projects.

​This damn blog is hard to put together every week. I'm glad the 6th graders left, they were starting to annoy me.

Oh yeah, I forgot. I painted the aft deck beams, The next day I decided to glue on the rubber pads on the bottoms. I painted on the contact cement and the paint immediately started to blister. Apparently I had to wait longer. ​There's​ a sixth grade mistake!  I scraped off the paint and painted two coats. I am giving it ample time to cure before I try it again. There is nothing so simple that man can't screw it up!

The Music: Harry Belafonte "Zombie Jamboree"

Sure, why not? Back to back.........

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