Day 18 Poets Day

Tea Count 2
Injuries 0
Time Spent 4 Hours
Stickiness Factor 0/10

For readers who are unaware of poets let me enlighten you. Poets day only ever occurs on a Friday and involves leaving work early because as the acronym alludes "tomorrow's Saturday". I'll leave you work out the first two words.

As you will no doubt have guessed this is Friday's post. A week of early mornings allowed me to accumulate some time and take Friday afternoon as boat building time. Thanks as ever to my lovely wife for allowing me leave my desk while she continued working for the afternoon.

As mentioned in my last post I've added one or two luxuries to the build and having decided on the beverage holders the next addition was going to be either cutting edge sound system, periscope in case of submersion (likely) or some decorative decking instead of plain old wood decking. The sound system would add too much weight and mixing water with electrics is suicide in my book. The periscope? well that's just ridiculous, though useful. So onto the decorative decking! That'll test my marquetry skills, or it would if I had any.

I made my plan, sort of and starting cutting some strips of wood from my off cuts and left overs. Now even if I do say so myself, I think it looks pretty awesome and of course will look more awsomeer when its sanded flush and varnished. The downside is this. What you see in this photograph is the sum total of my 4 four hours work! Looks great but rather than progressing with the build I think I'm falling further behind and now in serious danger of missing launch date.

Fortunately I haven't sold any tickets to would be passengers so no refunds to worry about, just a little face loosing which by the way would not be a problem right now as the face is still very much in itchy and scratchy mode.

On a final note I have now managed the shape the troublesome piece that runs along the top of the bulkhead to meet the gunwales. TFFT

Day 17 Supplemental - Itchy and Scratchy

Tea Count 1
Injuries 0
Time Spent 2 Hours
Stickiness factor 10/10

In order to have any chance of meeting my self imposed launch date of March 17th I decided to put some evening shifts in. A couple of hours here and there should go some way to helping me achieve my deadline. This decision was not taken lightly as time off at the moment is sparse as work has been particularly good lately. The pressure to meet my launch date has been getting quite intense from various quarters. Not least of which is our party planned for the 17th which is supposed to be both a birthday and launch party, hopefully it still will be both. One friend heaped on the pressure on monday night by informing me that he had invested in bread with which to feed the ducks on launch day. You know who your are "H" and I will do all I can not to let you down but if I do, I will at the very least reimburse you for the bread.

So last Tuesday evening I donned my now ever so poxie stained overalls and gave half number one a second coat of resin on her bottom:-). This proved far easier than the first coat which I applied to glass cloth. After diligently reading some advice I kept my resin warm and kept the coat thin and this did go most of the way to avoiding runs and sags in the resin. It's still damn tricky stuff to apply evenly though especially on curved surfaces like boats.

I don't seem to be helping my own deadline much as now the boat is approaching completion I'm adding in some luxury extras. The first of these is of the obligatory beverage holders, yes you read it correctly folks, beverage holders. If luxury cars have them then so should my canoe.

On to health issues now. I am undecided if it's the remnants of the loft insulation on my overalls collar or poxie fumes and resin from the boat but my neck feels like a Simpsons spin off cartoon, that's itchy and scratchy to the non Bartonians. It's been like it for a couple weeks now and the rash is a little unsightly. More unnervingly the itching is equally as bad under my eyes on my cheekbones and now on my eye lids. Let me tell you itchy eye lids is no fun at all not least of all because I keep missing the footy. I have to close my eyes to have a good rub and on opening them everything is very blurry indeed.. Today I've missed two goals that I am aware of. If anyone has any medical knowledge of how to alleviate fiber glass/resin induced dermatitis I'll gladly take the advice.

Day 17 Sods Law!

Tea Count 3
Injuries 1 (A bad gash to the thumb)
Time Spent 5 Hours
Blood factor 5/10

Hello once again fellow bloggers, readers and boat building buddies.  As you can see my followers increased in number this week by a massive two fifths and I'm now confident of hitting double figures before the end of the build.  I thought it time to catch up with some updates as once again readers I am behind by a couple of days.

Last Sunday was indeed day seventeen and was largely given over to the creation of the inner gunwales and fitting two of them to half number one the aft section or the fore section...whatever!  In addition I spent a fair portion of time cutting to shape the piece of wood that be needed to run across the top of the bulkhead to meet the inner gunwales.  This is far harder than it sounds as the piece has be cut and shaped in three directions to take the shape of the boat from back to front, as well as top to bottom, as well as meet the gunwales at the right angle and take into account the slight slope of the bulkhead and...and... and...see, it's a very hard piece to shape!  Needless to say I went through three lengths of wood before giving up and vowing to do better on another day.

After a trial fit of the gunwales I had ripped to size on my trusted table saw it was obvious

there was no way on this earth they were going to bend enough to follow the curve and contour of the boat.  Being deeper that the outer gunwales meant they were much more resistant to bending.  I decided a compromise was needed and so slimmed them down somewhat to make life a little easier.  I also routed some sections out of the gunwales which would allow any water left in the canoe to drain out when stored upside down, and it makes them look pretty!  Rather handily it also made the gunwales more flexible and I was able to easily bend them into shape.  Anyone would have thought I planned it that way!  Actually I did but no-ones ever going to believe me.  I dry fitted the gunwales into place but they'll have to come off again later to be poxied.  The boat is really feeling quite rigid and strong now.

A large part of my day, and I mean over an hour, was spent looking for my countersink drill bit.  I only have the one and losing it meant the project was stalled until I could find or replace it.  When eventually I did find it I couldn't quite believe how well "sod" had implemented it's long, pointless and ever recurring law.  Out of interest, probably to me only, I took some measurements.  The gap between the table saw blade and the edge of the blade slot in the table is ten millimeters.

 The widest part of the drill bit is nine millimeters!  For this drill bit to have fallen in the direction of the slot is one thing.  The chances of it landing at such an angle that it could fall through the slot  is astonishing and then to top things off it landed inside the blade tilting mechanism and in doing so adjusted itself so that no matter how much shaking, banking and poking it was never going to fall loose.  In one split second butter finger moment, dropping my drill bit had successfully disabled not only my ability to drill and countersink the holes needed to fit the gunwales but had also disabled the table saw and hence my ability of cutting the remaining gunwales.  The table saw required a complete strip down to retrieve my bit.  Please also bear in mind that I had spent the best part of half an hour searching for the damn thing and it was only in one of those "I wonder" moments that I had peered down into the depths of the saw only to see the damn drill bit staring back at me.

The day did not end well either.  Todays use of sharps and power tools meant that the danger stakes were always going to be high.  A table saw, a router, drill, tenon saw, three different chisels, stanley knife, two different sanding machines... I could go on!  So which one do you think gave me the gash across the base of my thumb.  A deep gash at that and one which could well have rendered me useless for the day had it not happened right on last knockings.  Well readers, I can reveal to you now that it was none of these death inducing implements!  Whist clearing up at the end of my day I lifted a box containing some left over papers from my sons paper-round and as I did so a one of the papers revealed it's ugly brutish and uncaring nature and slashed me across the ball of my thumb.  I had become the victim of a brutal paper cut attack and once again sod had demonstrated it's relentless desire to implement it's own rule of law!