BTW

Turns out I wasn't so lucky after all. While the building jig was level, it wasn't square. Luck did not intervene; Cary did. He said every time he looked at it, he knew it wasn't right, and he proved it to me with a construction framing square. This, of course, broke my heart and moved me to tears, but Cary said he would help me make it square, and that the tweaking should take only half a day. I made him promise that while we do that, he must behave like a civilized human being: no name-calling, no sarcasm, no condescension or derision. He agreed, but that means he'll have to acquire a new personality, at least for half a day.

Meanwhile, I attached the forekeel to the bow transom and determined that it will fit in place accurately on the jig, square or not. The directions for building this boat are not exactly thorough and often require interpretation and initiative on my part. That is a good trick because usually I have no idea what I'm doing. For the transom-forekeel assembly, I figured out that I had to countersink some screws, although the word "countersink" had never been in my vocabulary. I did a rather blonde job of it, but nothing that a little wood putty can't fix. As always, I learned later that a special tool exists for countersinking; it's called a countersink drill bit.

BTW (which I thought meant "bites the weenie" but found out it means "by the way"), I e-mailed WoodenBoat with my question about laminating. I asked if it is really necessary to laminate the center frame and forekeel, or if you could just use already-laminated 3/4" marine plywood instead. They have not responded. Now that BTW, if you catch my drift.

Drill team

Video Hosting - Upload Video - Video Sharing

Fleeta shoots mom

13 July 2006
Part of my New Year’s resolution was to make a documentary film about my boatbuilding project, and until last week I had made no progress on that aspect of the endeavour. All day Sunday, I worked on my boat while Kelsey hung around the house without much to do, so I prevailed upon her to shoot me. (That reminds me of a powerful scene in Tommy Lee Jones’s movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, in which a blind man asks TLJ to shoot him, but I digress...) Anyway, I have posted two short videos, “Drill Sergeant” and “Drill Sergeant, Part Deux,” that show me working on the building jig. Kelsey shot those with my little digital camera; I gave up on getting a real video camera, mainly because I can’t afford one, but also because I don’t really want one. The film portion of this project will just have to consist of poor quality, short video clips from my digital camera. We have an expression around our house for this lazy approach to a situation: “It’s the least I can do.”

Last Sunday was a most productive day:
I assembled the building jig, which includes the ladder frame, the two station molds, the laminated center frame, and the expertly-beveled stern transom. I may not have won the lottery, but by sheer luck and without even trying, the building jig turned out perfectly level. The only part left to do is to attach the forekeel and bow transom, which might be tricky but maybe luck will intervene again.

Fleeta Foote is back

Two weeks ago, my 17-year-old daughter, Kelsey, aka Fleeta Foote, returned from her one-year stint as an exchange student in Costa Rica. This called for celebration and visits from numerous relatives and friends eager to see her. My brother-in-law, Roger, asked me if I could foresee anytime in the future that I would be able to work on my boat, and I assured him that progress would proceed much more rapidly now that I had an extra set of hands to help me. He laughed and said, “I thought you’d have less time because you’d be busy doing things with Kelsey.” He was right, of course. In the two weeks that Kelsey has been home, I’ve accomplished very little on the boat, but I have gone wine tasting in Healdsburg (with Kelsey as the designated, resentful driver), shopping with both daughters, to Monterey for the Fourth of July, read books, and with Kelsey watched numerous episodes of her favorite TV show, “Friends.” We also went to see The Devil Wears Prada and enjoyed every minute of it.

Blonde bevels bow of boat

Sunday, 18 June 2006
In addition to the two laminated pieces, I also wanted to cut out the plywood pieces for the bow and stern transoms. First, I had to transfer the patterns. For this I used white sailcloth because (a) you can see through it like tracing paper, and (b) it does not stretch, tear, crack, or splinter; it is dimensionally stable. So I finished all that, unloaded the securely strapped plywood from the top of the car, drew the patterns onto the wood, and chop-chop-chopped.

So far so good. The next step was to bevel the edges of the transoms, a process I had no idea how to accomplish. I gathered every tool I could think of: power planer, hand plane, rasp, chisel, sandpaper. In my boatbuilding book, the section on beveling says, “Bevel edges of transoms.” The power planer scared me, the hand plane frustrated me, the rasp didn’t do what I wanted, the chisel was the wrong tool, the sandpaper was ineffective. So I pulled out the one tool that always works for me: tears. “I want to do this but I don’t know how,” I sobbed to Cary. He softened and agreed to show me how to do it, and by that I mean he did it for me.

I may not win the Feminist of the Year award, but I will build this boat, with a little help from my friends.

Friday, July 7, 2006
My mind, if not my body, has been on vacation for a couple of weeks and could not concentrate long enough to blog. Meanwhile, I have worked a little on my boat:

1. I finished beveling the transoms. After Cary beveled the stern transom, he left me to my own devices for the bow transom. My first pass looked good, but when I laid the pattern on top, it became obvious that a second pass was in order. Anyway, I am now a skilled beveler and ready to assemble the building jig.

2. I cut the laminated pieces for the forekeel and center frame. Those turned out fine except they will need quite a bit of wood putty to fill the spaces left by my lousy laminating job. That reminds me: I must contact WoodenBoat about using plywood instead going to all that trouble of laminating.

Hey, I actually worked on my boat!

This poor neglected blog. Progress on the boat is moving at a glacial pace, and sometimes for every step forward I take two steps backward, but I am making progress.

Friday, 16 June 2006
I hitched a ride to Berkeley with Cary to buy marine plywood at MacBeath’s lumber yard on Ashby. They had everything I needed: one sheet of 3/4” ply, one sheet of 3/8”, and two sheets of 1/4”, all of it a Phillipine mahogany plywood called Hydrotek. Everyone seems to speak of MacBeath’s reverentially because it has a wide variety of woods and reasonable prices, but the help there stinks. The pale and soft young male (I can’t bring myself to call him a man) who fetched the sheets of plywood for me loaded them onto the racks on top of my car and said, “Thanks, bye.” When I asked him to help me secure them to the racks with the straps I had brought along, he said, “Sorry, we’re not allowed.” He added, looking at me knowingly, “Insurance.” A couple of unkind words flashed through my mind at that point because he had the look of someone who hasn’t lifted a finger to help anyone do anything in the two decades he’s been on earth, but I bit my tongue and just shook my head. In retaliation, I refused to move my car out of their driveway until I had tied the boards down with the straps, and I took my sweet time doing it.

From Berkeley, I drove back to Richmond to fetch Cary from the yacht harbor where he was working. In the parking lot, I inspected my plywood and saw that I had barely made it there without losing the boards on the freeway. That word “insurance” came back to haunt me, but I banished it like Satan from my mind. Cary wasn’t ready to leave yet, so I set to work re-tying the boards. Luckily, there was a man, a real man, in the parking lot who came to my rescue. Apparently an expert on the physics of strapping boards to the top of a car, he explained to me in detail what I had done wrong and how he would do it right. Fine by me. He did a great job of it, and he was refreshingly unconcerned about insurance.

Back in Petaluma, I unclamped the glued pieces that had been curing for two weeks and saw that I had done a really bad job of laminating. Cary reassured me that a little putty, a little paint, will make them seem like what they ain’t. I transferred the patterns for the center frame and the forekeel onto the poorly laminated pieces and wondered: Why do to all this trouble of laminating strips of wood? Why not use 3/4” plywood? It’s already laminated and it’s the correct thickness. I asked Cary and he saw no reason not to. I’m going to contact WoodenBoat and see what they say.