It's been a low production week. The weather has been recalcitrant, we cannot glue those parts, and we are dealing with an unmanageable contraption: the damn boat. I am accustomed to working wood where everything is fairly easy to place. Furniture sits on level floors and things mostly are at right angles. All this goes out the window (porthole) on a boat. A boat is curved vertically and horizontally so there are no reference points. Also, the boat under way is constantly moving. Case in point: we are making shelves for the sides of the cabins. We are setting them on a stringer for support. Along that stringer, the hull is curved so we have to make a template out of cardboard and fit it to the hull. This involves tracing the hull curvature onto the cardboard by holding the cardboard in place and drawing a curved line parallel to the hull using a thick enough block of wood as a stand off and a pencil to reach all of the cardboard. Then we cut the cardboard to shape and keep trimming until it fits. Next, we trace the cardboard onto a piece of plywood, cut it out, and start trimming it until the piece fits. So, now how do we cut the front edge straight? What's straight? The back edge is curved and different dimensions from one end to the other. Oh yeah, what's level??? Ben can handle a couple hours of this until he walks off grumbling and muttering. Ben is on the right, shelf on the left.
Pretty boring pictures. I figure piles of plywood pieces are even more boring. I've been working oak and delving into the nether regions of the starboard hull to try to figure out what I'm doing with my cabin and the chartroom (chart area). I am also working out the configuration of the head (bathroom). I made a shelf to hold the SSB (radio) over the chart room. Now, designing something like this is difficult. You don't know where to put things because you have no good practical experience about how things will go on the boat. So we make educated guesses. We won't really know until we're at sea and see the need of a shelf "right here". I dragged the stove into it's relative position to see if the fit would be OK. Now I have this big ass stove in the way and it takes a gorilla to move it! Got a banana?
When we talk to our friends, we say we post something to our blog. They say something like "oh yeah, I should check it out, but I haven't got time" or "You have a blog?". I guess this is for the perusal of solo batty British boat builders and other lunatics. Ya gotta be crazy..............
The Music ♪: Dylan
We are currently playing the entire discography of Bob Dylan in chronological order. I couldn't find good Dylan recordings on you tube. You'll have to get the Rumpke Mountain Boys version of " Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts". Don't ask how the Rumpke Mountain Boys got their Name!
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