Olivier sent me a link a few weeks ago that had a picture of his motor wells. The were beautiful.....................I hate him! Solo boat builders are blessed. Our three craftsmen all think differently and their methods of work are completely different. Case in point: the motor wells. I started them. My process, thought out and started was halted when Budge took over for a while, cutting the transoms and doing things differently, then handed back to me to proceed. The thoughts were no longer my own and I was not sure how to proceed. We kill our creativity by questioning each other on how to proceed thus stopping the process by making the original thinker question his process. It's the same "too many cooks" conundrum. We do this too much. I think something through and get stopped dead by the "why don't you do it this way?" question. At that point I end up re-thinking the process. There are many roads to the same place (see: "skin a cat"), just pick one, not three.. So we glued up the motor well transom pieces.....
Nice and thick!
We tend to overbuild. My motors have lots of torque, so the sides and transom of the motor wells are tripled instead of doubled. Ben and I glued them up and Budge cut out the transoms. I had figured them differently and told Budge to put the short side on the inside not the outside, so they ended up wrong because he cut them slightly differently................too many cooks!
Ben and I glued up the sides.
And the bottom on. I had to make some backing blocks for the hull chainplates. I decided to use some white oak that I had re-sawed for the tillers. They were too thin, so I laminated two together to get them thick enough.......You know me.....................
44 clamps!....................Wait!
Aaaaah, better: 45 Clamps! Wednesday, Ben flew to Ohio to do some electrical work on the house: Bad Neutral in a circuit- had to go into the box. I gave him a troubleshooting course and a multimeter and sent him off. That shot the afternoon. Thursday was a fiddle around day, me getting organized to work solo for a while. Budge's life gets complicate for a few weeks.............. I cut out the sides of the motor wells and we glued them on.
Hold 'em in place, draw a line, cut 'em out. glue 'em on! Cake!
I suppose you want to see the finished rudders, so here they are! And, I might add, facing the correct way! Our three cooks could not spot that they were backwards.....triple "duh" for us all Doh!
So, not being able to ignore it any longer, we turned our attentions to the beams. There are four of them, three 20 footers and a 14 footer. We needed a surface to work off. We enlarged the work table with an extension of a platform that Ben and I rescued from someone's burn pile.
Budge and "Grin" (of Grin and Bear it fame). Working on the legs. That damn table is now 19 feet long! Budge is going to build a Narai Mk IV, so we decided to produce eight crossbeams for the two boats. I dragged out the plans, grrrrrrrrrr. The beams were on 2 sheets, plus a cut sheet, plus a book, plus a correction sheet!
The correction sheet says: "Make the beams slightly longer" How big is a "slightly"?????????? Every time I look at the plans, I want to show up at the designer's house with torches and pitchforks! My logic is not compatible with theirs. After a lively discussion, Budge and I decided to scrap the cut sheet and cut them out easier. This will save a huge amount of time and a truckload of frustration. we will cut them square and shape them later, after they are laminated. Remember, we will be building 8 beams and it helps if they are mostly the same.
The weather has been beautiful. Some wildflowers are blooming. Bill, the crow (not Jack de Crow, not Uncle Bill), official shop crow, is always announcing his presence at various spots in the yard.
Oh yeah, Uncle Bill. We are working with Meranti plywood. It is a wood from the Philippines and is extremely chippy and splintery. When we handle it, we get a lot of splinters in our hands. The best way to dig them out is to use an Uncle Bill's Sliver Gripper (in silver), available at your local Ebay. Uncle bill's silver sliver gripper grabber.
I have had a pair for many years and they are the best tweezers I've ever had!
The Music ♫: Huun-Huur-Tu
Just shut up and listen...................................or you can sing along. Frank Zappa loved these guys......................me too......... Ghengis Kahn, too. I've seen them 3 times.
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